Set Up Your Logs for Better Insight: Make Logs First-class Citizens In Your Codebase

CrowdStrike's blog emphasizes the importance of logging as a crucial tool in understanding backend systems, transforming static code into dynamic entities and providing insights into software operations. The text outlines the benefits of reading and iterating over logs, advocating for their integration as first-class citizens in codebases. It discusses the use of different log levels, from error to info, to better manage unexpected system events and highlights the choice between structured and unstructured logs based on ease of human readability versus machine parsing. The blog also compares logs to metrics, suggesting that while logs document individual events, metrics aggregate these events, offering a broader overview of system performance. It stresses the importance of context in logging, recommending the inclusion of key lifecycle events and state changes in workflows, and underlining that a robust logging strategy should complement metrics to provide comprehensive system insights.