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Another one is to generate a globally unique id for that failure. In a web application the user can share the id with you and you can look in the log and see the associated error.

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That seems like a good idea, but the problem is that any ID long enough to be sensibly globally unique is likely to be a long string of random-ish characters, and unless the end user has at least a screen cap – highly unlikely – there's about a 0.0001% chance you'll get the code correctly.

On the flip side, if you're willing to give up globally unique for "unique enough within and reasonable time frame" then you can go with just a few characters or even short words.

We did this. Basically showing the semi-unique request-id / correlation-id to the user, or include it in our response headers in our APIs. So when people contacted us with a screenshot or a dump of a request that failed, it was easy to find the exact one in our logs.

Yeah, just like there is a high fraction of people who can't see 3D movies there are a lot of people who can't cut and paste.

Just use both. A globally unique but static "error code" to google plus a serial number of that distinct instance of the failure.

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