Logging in Ruby: (Almost) Everything You Need to Know | Hacker News Reader

Logging in Ruby: (Almost) Everything You Need to Know

akshaykhot.com

55 pointsthunderbong16 comments

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Great post! Akshay has been super active in the Ruby / Rails communities on Reddit and he's always supportive.

Glad to see one of his posts here on HN.

And frankly stunning to see a Ruby post on the front page!

There was a “Metaprogramming in Ruby” article on the front page last week

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36875815

How can a log level be unknown?

It could be useful for logging messages that don't fit a particular category, i.e. a catch-all category, to identify patterns over time. Edit: You could also use it to turn-off logging for a while. Since unknown is the highest level, no other logs would be recorded.

Can you give an example of a log message that would not fit typical logging levels? (Info/Debug/Error etc)

I was trying to think of a good example, but the following table from RFC 5424 [1] might be a good starting point. I guess unknown could be used for the top 3 conditions.

           Numerical         Severity
             Code

              0       Emergency: system is unusable
              1       Alert: action must be taken immediately
              2       Critical: critical conditions
              3       Error: error conditions
              4       Warning: warning conditions
              5       Notice: normal but significant condition
              6       Informational: informational messages
              7       Debug: debug-level messages

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc5424

possibly the log value was reduced to just a string when it crossed an api boundary or something?

The code has noticed a condition that may or may not be meaningful—it is not explicitly handled or classified. The correct place the message noting this ought to go could well be unknown. INFO buries it, which may be very bad. Higher severities might be crying wolf. UNKNOWN starts showing up in the logs, that tells you to go take a closer look, and tells you that nobody has encoded the severity of the message into the system.

Based on how it is implemented, it probably should've been called `trace` because it is one level below debug.

Wow in 2023 someone thinks this is worth a blog post?

At least some log scraping + monitors with graylog, ELK or the like would be the minimum imo…

> Wow in 2023 someone thinks this is worth a blog post?

It was meant to be a beginner-level introduction to logging (especially for those developers who got started in 2023 ;))

But you find those things in every basic book or course etc. That are the very basics nowadays.

And I would not call scraping and monitoring advanced topics.

Advanced topics are multi stage image builds, helm charts + deployments and clean architecture. Just to name a few.

Dirty architecture is more advanced topic i think.

In the ridiculous clockwork that is "modern" software deployment, sure.

But what if you're just trying to stand up a rails app on a boring linux droplet?

If only you weren't forced to read it.

Everyone starts somewhere. Log scraping and monitoring is a pretty advanced topic for a new developer.

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