Dear Code Monkeys…

Whilst thou art writeth thy codeth, pleaseth consider thy following ruleseth….

(Pardon the CAPS lock screaming)

In addition to my usual rants about [no local admin rights], [silent installers] and [consistent tools and features], I’d like to mention something about the poor, unsung heroes of the IT world:  LOGS

That’s right: LOGS.  Just like Ren and Stimpy used to sing about.  And while you can play with both kinds of logs, these logs aren’t nearly as happy to be around.

 

Some suggestions for logging features for your products:

1. Make some logs when needed.  If not by default, at least provide an option to turn them on.  Verbosity control would be nice too.
2. If you can leverage the Windows event logs, that helps other systems that do forwarding and monitoring, etc.
3. Make your logs with a consistent format.
4. Provide searchable / filter-able logs

Example: Crappy Log

“module 440981230934810123oi defaulted on zmerw234::init() invocation to the fist:in-face-foot-up-ass() module 341234091230909 m-alloc().p-init{}::void([])”, “2017030312331409134013019238019238”

Example: Happy Log

“A crappy little function in module (foot-up-ass) was unable to initialize upon request. Additional details are saved to verbose.log in the logs folder”,”minimal”, “warning”, “main-init”, “03/03/2017, 12:33 AM GMT”

The above might map to columns: description, userimpact, category, source, eventtime (just a suggestion)

Basically, structure it like it would belong in a spreadsheet or a database table row.  Break out fields/columns so it allows for sorting, filtering, grouping without requiring wildcard/pattern-matching as the only means.

Rant/Over