The structured logging challenge

There is quite a bit of work on generating structured logs to enable more effective diagnosis of system states, particularly, faults and failures. Readers of this article may be interested in the rationalization of kernel log messages reported in

J. Hammond, T. Minyard and J. Browne “End-to-end framework for fault management for open source clusters: Ranger” Proceedings of the 2010 TeraGrid Conference

The remaining major obstacle to effective diagnostic use of system logs, once the kernel logging is rationalized as in the article cited above, is the fact that most software subsystem log are ad hoc and incomplete.

Jim Browne