Re:Logging and Learning
by patio11 on Wednesday December 10, 2008 @11:29PM
(#393960)
I agree so much with the "Log files are where data goes to die" that it hurts. Here's what I spent half an hour investigating this morning.
The general flavor, with more than a few details fictionalized: picture your standard credit card order form.
First Name: Elaine Smith who teaches in 6th grade at George Washington Middle
Last Name: School
Now, in a real comedy of unlikely events, everybody just passed that transaction along to the next step of the chain.
My app: Paypal collects billing details, let them worry about the correctness of them.
Paypal: She's got a username and password and a Paypal balance? Transaction authorized!
Payment processor: A transaction from Paypal? OK, email straight to her spam folder, hit the script on Patrick's site to record transaction.
Script: First name, please? Hurk. writes error message to log file
Customer: Where's my stuff?
Me: checks records That's funny, I can't find a record of this transaction anywhere in the database... Why don't I spend thirty minutes fruitlessly searching for variations of her name? Oh, no dice, hmm, one last thing to try: sudo grep "George Washington" production.log... Oh crud.
New feature as of this evening: any hits on the sale notification script which do not result in a successful save to the database are going to displayed on my web dashboard in Blaze Orange.
The general flavor, with more than a few details fictionalized: picture your standard credit card order form.
First Name: Elaine Smith who teaches in 6th grade at George Washington Middle
Last Name: School
Now, in a real comedy of unlikely events, everybody just passed that transaction along to the next step of the chain.
My app: Paypal collects billing details, let them worry about the correctness of them.
Paypal: She's got a username and password and a Paypal balance? Transaction authorized!
Payment processor: A transaction from Paypal? OK, email straight to her spam folder, hit the script on Patrick's site to record transaction.
Script: First name, please? Hurk. writes error message to log file
Customer: Where's my stuff?
Me: checks records That's funny, I can't find a record of this transaction anywhere in the database... Why don't I spend thirty minutes fruitlessly searching for variations of her name? Oh, no dice, hmm, one last thing to try: sudo grep "George Washington" production.log... Oh crud.
New feature as of this evening: any hits on the sale notification script which do not result in a successful save to the database are going to displayed on my web dashboard in Blaze Orange.