Troubleshooting Login Failures

Jana Sattainathan explains why the default login failure message is so unhelpful:

At first glance, it appears to be utterly useless. The only useful message seems to be “Login failed for user ‘myuser‘.” but what we really need to know is “why?”.

That information is somewhat buried in this section of the message:

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Server Name: mysqlserverinstance Error Number: 18456 Severity: 14 State: 1

Based on the documentation for this error, the severity and state actually mean something. I have copied and pasted the same from the link.

Read on to find out how to get the actual error.