Tim Wilde shares an oft-forgotten truth:
How often have you found yourself contemplating some hair-brained regex scheme in order to extract an inkling of value from a string and wishing the data had just arrived in a well-structured package without all the textual fluff?
So why do we insist on writing prose in our logs? Take “Exception while processing order 1234 for customer abc123” for example. There are at least four important pieces of information drowning in that one sentence alone:
- An exception was raised!
- During order processing
- Order number 1234
- Customer abc123
Being an exception log message, it’s more than likely followed by a stack trace, too. And stack traces certainly don’t conform to carefully crafted log layout patterns.
Logging is something we tend to forget about and slap in at the last minute. We also think about it from the viewpoint of a developer looking at a single error message. Those are both mistakes that lead to a huge amount of extra work later.