Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

First of all, don’t ask this! Instead of asking what to log, we should start by asking “what questions do we want to answer?” Then, we can determine which data needs to be logged in order to best answer these questions. Once a question comes up, we can answer it using only the data and knowledge that we have on hand. In emergent situations such as an unforeseen system failure, we cannot change the system to log new data to answer questions about the current state of the system.

It sounds like a wild claim, considering that billion dollar companies like Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, and Solarwinds are consistently making national headlines, for both good and bad reasons. Observability leaders are anything but invisible, so how can the perfect solution be different? Are they that far off?

There is nothing worse than waking up to an angry customer complaining that your website is failing to accept their payment at checkout. This may be worrying for some since payments not being processed can be equivalent to losing money; however with Tag Spotlight, this should be a relatively quick problem to dissect. The key question here is whether this is an issue that all our customers are facing or an isolated event.

Troubleshooting cloud services and infrastructure is an ongoing challenge for organizations of all sizes. As organizations adopt more cloud services and their cloud environments grow more complex, they naturally produce more telemetry data – including application, system and security logs that document all types of events. All cloud services and infrastructure components generate their own, distinct logs.

Following best practices when logging helps make sure they contain the right information when needed. Some common best practices for logging errors in.NET are listed below.