Logging Strategy
Decides what to log from the questions you will need to answer at 3am, rather than logging everything and finding nothing.
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Running it, start to finish
- Write down the questions an incident will need answered.
- Thread a request id through everything, including outbound calls.
- Check the design against a past incident before adopting it.
What you get back
The output this produces, every time.
- Designs backwards from the questions an incident will ask, rather than forwards from what seems interesting.
- Logs the inputs to a decision, not just its outcome, which is what makes a rejection diagnosable.
- Tests the design against your actual incident history, which is the only real check.
Getting better results
Where this usually goes wrong, and how to avoid it.
- Log events with fields, not sentences. A concatenated message cannot be filtered or aggregated, which is the whole difference between logs and useful logs.
- Log the start of long operations. Logging only completion makes a hung operation invisible, which is precisely when you most need to see it.
- Reserve error for things people act on. An error level nobody responds to trains everyone to ignore it, and then the real one is missed too.
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Written for The AI University. Every prompt in this library is original work — authored, tested and revised here, not collected from elsewhere. 365 of them, free with an account.