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Logging Maturity Level

Chaos

• You don't know whether a program has failed until a user tells you.
• You have no idea why the program failed.
• You don't even know whether the program is wrong or the user's expectations are wrong because the program or business process is completely undocumented.
• Your support team can't read the logs because they don't have access to the server.

Normal

• When a customer tells you that something isn't working, you can look at the logs and sometimes find out where it failed.
• Sometimes you have enough information in the logs to look in the database and find out why the program failed.
• Sometimes you even know which users were affected.
• The program filled up a server's disk because circular logging wasn't enabled and you caused an outage.
• You enabled circular logging but set it to 10MB which only lasts for 60 seconds so you can't find anything useful anyway.
• Your support team can't read the logs because the logs are so big that their text editor crashes.

Useful

• Log messages are recorded at severity levels which match their actual severity, i.e.: ERROR isn't used for DEBUG messages.
• Log messages contain enough information to investigate problems.
• Log messages are retained for long enough to be useful.
• When you get the time, you occasionally look at the logs create a support ticket if you find an error or warning.
• Your support team can't read the logs because they can't read a stack trace and infer meaning from it, other than "it's broken".
• There are so many errors being logged that you wouldn't dare to get the system to email you in case you crash the email server.

Elite

• Logs are collected centrally and retained for a set period using something like logstash or a RabbitMQ log4net appender.
• You can produce a graph of error rates for applications over time.
• This is regularly reviewed and attempts made to reduce the number of errors.
• Your support team can read and understand the messages, because they make sense.
• An error being logged is actually cause for concern.
• Your support team contact customers who've experienced a problem to apologise and explain what's being done to resolve the issue before the customer has had chance to raise a support ticket.
• You feel a deep sense of inner calm.

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