Logging plus code

How many of us have taken a log message and stuffed it into a Google query? It’s becoming standard practice these days. However, if you take that same log statement and search through the source code for it, you’ll often be brought to the tail end of the source code sending the log statement.

Not every log statement will be found in the source code as it’s presented in the logs. It’s not uncommon to insert variables such as indexes or IDs into logs. In fact, assigning a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) to each API call and attaching it to all log statements is a common mechanism for tracing, but searching for these items can be more daunting.

Let’s look at these two examples:

• Error loading State Index 42 – Hawaii into memory
• Error processing customer 6ed03803-ba55-4b07-a3f0-48add6f3d8f2: Address Missing.

Each of these log statements contains unique identifiers, the first an index and name, the second...