What guidelines do you adhere to for writing good logging statements

Question

I recently found a log statement in my projects codebase that says \"here i am with search parameter==>===========11/30/2008===1====00:00 AM\"

what guidelines do you

Answer 1

In my logs, I need the date and the time, the process that creates the logs, and the PID. There's nothing worse than looking at logs and wondering whether they came in five minutes ago, or whether they were left behind 5 years ago before your changes. Date and time are important.

When I report errors, I state concisely what was called, what happened, and what error codes came back. If it's errno, I also report back strerror(errno). I'm reading this to find a problem, and usually I'm in a screaming hurry to find the problem. I don't want to look stuff up. I want it to tell me what happened, and I prefer verbose to useless. If I'm debugging, and often even when I'm not, I'll log all the data like the SQL statement or the low-level record, keys, anything that will help me find the problem ASAP.

Sometimes we log insanely, and it can slow the system slightly. But when shit goes down and we get a subpoena and there's a lawsuit on the loose and accusations of baby-killer are being thrown around, we love that we have enough logs on tap to show exactly what happened and why and who caused it. It's Blame Management.