Collective Wisdom from the Experts 181
Distributed systems add another level of complexity. You have to decide how
to deal with an external dependency failing. If your system is very distributed,
this may be a common occurrence. Make sure your logging policy takes this
into account.
In general, the best indication that everything is all right is that the messages
at a lower priority are ticking along happily. I want about one INFO-level log
message for every significant application event.
A cluttered log is an indication that the system will be hard to control once it
reaches production. If you don’t expect anything to show up in the error log, it
will be much easier to know what to do when something does show up.