How do you choose the best logging and tracing tools for your project?

Logs are code-inserted statements reflecting the application's state, and traces depict the application's execution path. In a web application, logging request and response objects can show the data exchanged between server and client. Traces, a sequence of logs, illustrate the program's flow. Implementing logging and tracing involves two components: Libraries in the application code to capture logs and traces for transmission to a service. A service that collects and provides an interface for analyzing these logs and traces. There are various tools for this, ranging from paid services like Datadog and Splunk, which manage infrastructure, to open-source options like the ELK Stack, Grafana, and Prometheus.

We can visualize logs like a print statements for big applications, which helps in understanding application execution state; while traces are sequence of logs that helps in understanding bigger picture of application execution path. Good logging practice, i.e, properly modelled info, debug, error, and warning logs can not just help in identifying application running state but can also help in debugging your application. There are clients libraries, like statsd, datadog, with support for multiple programming languages; which transmits these logs to daemon service, which captures the logs and stores in timeseries stores like prometheus, which can be further used to create alerting pipelines for real-time capturing of application failures.

Logging and tracing tools monitor and record events and transactions within applications and systems. Logging tools capture various log messages for troubleshooting, while tracing tools track the flow of transactions across distributed systems for performance analysis. They help optimize software performance and reliability.

Logging and tracing can be extremely useful for debugging for a single reason: it's easier to understand what went wrong in the case of a bug, especially if you don't have core dumps and only observe unexpected behavior in the product. However, this tooling requires careful attention—you shouldn't log every single line. Instead, consider reporting only important steps in your program. For example, in a web service, I would consider logging the request and result in a compact form.

When choosing logging and tracing tools, it is recommended that; 1) If the log cannot display signature when issue occurs, you need to find another tracing or logging tools which reveal message or log in more detail. 2) When enabling logging to enable tracing tools, overhead in terms of performance can be observed. 3) Sometimes stability issue cannot be reproduced when enabling tracing tools. 4) Platform (e.g: Android) may already support various tracing tools. Checking the available tracing tools is the first way.

Logging and tracing tools are crucial for debugging because they: - Capture events like errors and warnings. - Help identify and troubleshoot issues. - Track transaction flow and performance. - Enable collaboration among developers. They are essential for diagnosing software problems and optimizing performance.

Perfect logging should log *everything* you do in software without even trying to log yourself. It should to scale itself automagically. it should to allow replay every step software does. And, it should to log itself, very blazingly, without using any resource. It would be perfect to have such logger. Close to this perfection - then better

Error logging tools like Zipy play a pivotal role in debugging by: - Comprehensive Error Details: Zipy logs comprehensive error details including stack traces, environment information, and user context, aiding in root cause analysis. - Issue Prioritization: Zipy categorizes errors by frequency and severity, helping developers prioritize debugging efforts and focus on critical issues. - Performance Monitoring: Beyond error logging, Zipy offers performance monitoring capabilities, enabling developers to proactively identify and address potential bottlenecks and issues before they impact users. - Real-time Alerts: Zipy provides real-time alerts when errors occur, allowing immediate investigation and resolution.