I don't like the approach

Posted Nov 21, 2011 20:32 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630)
Parent article: That newfangled Journal thing

I think something has to be done to organize logging, but I do not like a binary log format. It's a non-starter for me.

We index our log files and build structured data describing them, but all the indexes and meta-data are stored in separate files. If you have the separate files lying around, you can use tools to quickly search the logs, extract date ranges, see structured data, etc. But if these binary index files are missing, you still have the raw log data available to standard tools like grep and friends.

I don't see why the structured logging problem can't be solved by adding to the existing log files instead of replacing them with a new binary format. You can implement the same API as you would with the binary-only log format, but you get the benefit of plain-text log files for emergency situations.