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Discussion on: Logging done right, makes your life bright!

 
grhegde09 profile image
Gajanan

I mostly agree with Phill. However unfortunate it is, the following is true! 1. It may be very hard to reproduce an issue with proper log settings. 2. System may not remain in the problematic state forever.

But like I mentioned the size of the log file on some systems are limited. We have a rotating log file of 50MB size. You may not believe me when I say 50MB is not sufficient to capture the logs for 30 minutes when we set log level to debug/trace. We don't have a way of backing up these logs to some server to analyse later. What we have is just 50MB! So we have to apply filters at the generation point!

We have to smartly design our logging system after considering all the limitations of the target system!

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phlash profile image
Phil Ashby

Sucks to be limited to 50MB and no way to siphon off to longer term storage! How about allocating some of that space to a short term circular log at debug level, enough to capture a few seconds of history or a couple of cycles through the main application loop (probably <1MB?), then as/when bad things happen, copy that buffer to a new file and raise the alarm... you'll likely get 50+ chances to see what's going wrong before running out of space and having to remove the oldest logs.