(#bqxlviq) @prologic@twtxt.net In one project a bunch of work mates strongly advocated a new to everyone (them included) idea. Any incoming request must produce exactly one log line. Not more and not less. Exactly one. That way the log does not get spammed with lots of useless information most of the time and one immediately sees what went wrong, if at all. In the beginning I thought this is completely rediculous, because I had never seen this anywhere and thus just couldn’t imagine that this will work at all.

The technical details to only produce one log per request were sorted out fairly quickly with a customer logger, that just replaces the last message with the newly logged one and finally at response end actually logs it. When a Java component was completely rewritten in Go they tried it out and I was very surprised that it worked that well for the analysis. I basically never missed any other surrounding logs that would have been produced in the old log flooding style. Over time a few things such as structured context fields were added that turned out to be useful to have for error analysis. It’s been a couple of years, but I think we rewrote that logger a bunch of times to optimize even further and try out new API ideas we had.

I remember it as a surprisingly successful experiment. In my current project I also once tried to tell my work mates about that, but – just like me when I heard about it in the first month – they weren’t ready for it. :-) To be fair, we have a slightly different situation now than in the other project.