A useful strategy – logging everything

Oftentimes, logging is like taking backups or eating vegetables—we all know we should do it, but most of us forget. In distributed applications, we simply have no other choice—logging is essential. Not only that, logging everything is essential.

With many different processes running on potentially ephemeral remote resources at difficult-to-predict times, the only way to understand what happens is to have logging information and have it readily available and in an easily searchable format/system.

At the bare minimum, we should log process startup and exit time, exit code and exceptions (if any), all input arguments, all outputs, the full execution environment, the name and IP of the execution host, the current working directory, the user account as well as the full application configuration, and all software versions.

The idea is that if something goes wrong, we should be able to use this information to log onto the same machine (if still available), go...