Logging Level Arms Race

A common dysfunctional logging behavior I've seen is The Logging Level Arms Race:

1. Development, Test, QA and Production log at the INFO level.

2. People are ignorant or lazy or lack convenient tools to adjust the log level, and need to debug problems, so they log lots of "debug" information at the INFO level.

3. Production logs fill too quickly, so QA and Production are raised to only log WARNING and above.

4. Same need exists, so people log lots of DEBUG messages as the WARNING level.

5. Logs fill disk space too quickly, so QA and Production log only ERROR and above.

6. Same need exists, so everything gets logged at the ERROR level. 7... etc...

I've seen production systems that only log at the SEVERE level because at any lower level the log files would just fill the disk too quickly for operations to be able to manage it.

(as seen on http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/testdrivendevelopment/message/34403 )

I suspect the real problem is you have such a team as needs all that logging to debug issues.

I find related things a lot where it seems as if certain developers do not know how to get the right amount of logging. It also helps to be able to write code that doesn't tend to get weird complex issues that can be understood only by overlogging.

CategoryLogging