Metrics and an application log: your new best friends

Do you remember the time you spent an afternoon putting print statements in your app trying to debug an issue and removed them before shipping the fix, only to add them back in a day later to work on another issue? Wouldn’t it be great if those debug statements could just stay in your code forever? Like a little gift that keeps on giving, not just for you, but for everyone else on your team too.

That’s what an application log is for! Logs aren’t just for when things go wrong. They’re for helping you to keep track of what’s going on within your application.

We take a look at how you can add helpful messages throughout your codebase and leave them there, even in production! We’ll cover common logging strategies, log aggregation and how to efficiently work with your logs to get the data back out again.

We’ll also take a look at metrics solutions such as Graphite that can help augment your logs to help work out what was going on by correlating event logs with peaks/drops in other monitoring systems.

Slides