Creating an Actionable Logging Taxonomy

The standard syslog-based way to handle logs is to divide logs into categories like FATAL, ERROR, WARN,INFO, and DEBUG and use those categories to adjust which logs you see. Having a standard logging taxonomy is incredibly useful when you’re dealing with logs for many different systems, but for our backend web-servers, we didn’t find these syslog-based divisions to be actionable or easily searchable. We instead created our own categories that map to how we want to handle our logs.