Nils Bunge and Maxim Brown discuss the importance of logging in Java applications to gain visibility into performance and troubleshoot issues. They cover various Java logging frameworks, including JUL, Log4J, and Logback, as well as their respective facades like SLF4J. The authors explain how to create, configure, and format loggers, log levels, appenders, and layouts, providing examples for each. They also discuss the benefits of writing logs to a file, streaming logs to an endpoint, and logging to JSON, which can be used to add custom information like Mapped Diagnostic Context (MDC) and enrich logs with extra context and metadata. Additionally, they cover best practices for getting the most out of Java logs, including using centralized logging solutions and monitoring services like Datadog to collect, parse, and visualize logs alongside metrics and distributed request traces.