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.

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.

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.

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.