Do Not Log

• opentracing-javascript

  32 1,090 1.6 TypeScript

  Discontinued OpenTracing API for Javascript (both Node and browser). 🛑 This library is DEPRECATED! https://github.com/opentracing/specification/issues/163

  

I agree; but I think it'll take years, if ever, to change this culture.

Logging is a byproduct of a past time; everything is a file, stdout is a file, lets persist that file, now we have multiple replicas, lets collect the file into a multi-terabyte searchable database.

The biggest downside: Its WILDLY expensive. Large orgs often have an entire team dedicated to maintaining logging (ELK) infrastructure. This price-tag inevitably leads to bikeshedding on backend teams about how to "reduce the amount we're logging" or "cleaning up the logs" or "structuring them to be more useful".

Outside of development, they are so rarely useful. Yet inevitably someone will say: "you're just not structuring your logs correctly." Maybe that's true; similarly, I don't find vim to be a highly productive editing experience. Maybe I just don't have the thousands of extensions it would take to make it so. Or maybe You're stuck in the past and ignoring two decades of tooling improvement. Both can be true.

I'm phrasing this as a false dichotomy, because in many teams: it is. Logging is easy; its built-in to most languages; so devs log. The information we need is in the system; its a needle in a haystack, but the needle is there. We log when a request comes in, when it hits pertinent functions, when its finished, how its finished, the manager says: "just look at the logs". Instead of "what better tooling can we make an investment in so future investigations of this nature don't take a full day."

For starters: Tracing. Tracing systems should be built-in to EVERY LANGUAGE, just like console.log. We have a standard [1] sponsored by the Linux Foundation and supported by every major trace ingestion system. This is not a problem of camps and proprietary systems; its a problem of culture. I should be able to call a nodejs stdlib function at startup, specify where I want traces to go, sampling rate, etc, and immediately get every single function call instrumented. Its literally just highly-structured-by-default logging! Dump the spans to stdout by default! Our log ingestion systems can read each line, determine if its a span, if so route to trace ingestion, otherwise route to log ingestion.

This is a critical step because it asserts that tracing is actually a very powerful tool that everyone needs to learn, like logging. Everyone knows about logging. Why? console.log. Its there, it gets used. Tracing right now is relegated to a subculture of "advanced diagnostics"; you gotta adopt a tracing provider, bring in dependencies, learn each implementation of OpenTracing, authenticate to send traces over HTTP... as a community, we should normalize just "dump traces like you dump logs, to stdout", have a formatter to make them nice to use in development, and now all that instrumentation work that any dev is capable of utilizing (just like console.log) "just works" in production.

[1] https://opentracing.io/

• SurveyJS

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