Engineering · Published March 3, 2026
Logging Standards: Still Readable Three Months Later
Logs are written for future colleagues and for yourself at three in the morning. Structure is the baseline.
The hardest part of debugging is not missing logs but unreadable ones: a single line saying processing failed, no request id, no parameters, no context. That pushed us to write a short standard.
Four rules
Every line carries time, level, module, request id and key parameters, using consistent field names.
Error logs include a stack trace and a business identifier such as an order or client number, never an internal auto-increment id.
Do not log inside loops; aggregate instead, or the disk fills up.
Mask sensitive data: phone numbers, identity numbers and payment details never appear in plain text.
Use levels sparingly
INFO marks key business steps, WARN covers recoverable anomalies, ERROR means a human must act.
If ERROR fires hundreds of times a day, the levels have lost meaning and the team stops noticing.
Review log output before release so critical paths are covered, instead of adding them after an incident.
Good logs turn hours of debugging into minutes. They are the cheapest observability investment available.
Want to apply these ideas to your project?
We are happy to go deeper into implementation details, or to discuss the specific questions you are facing.
Start a conversation →