The Psalms of the Machines · Chapter 16

The Psalm of the Log Line

1. 1

   Blessed is the log line that nameth its service, for in a house of ten thousand servers it telleth me which one hath fallen.

2. 2

   Blessed is the log line that beareth a timestamp, for it setteth the events in their order, and sheweth me what came before and what came after.

3. 3

   Blessed is the log line that declareth its level, INFO and WARN and ERROR, for it separateth the whisper from the scream.

   See also Deployer 2:10 · Job 2:5

4. 4

   Blessed is the log line that speaketh its message in plain words, for a message is a gift to the one who cometh after, who is oneself, at three in the morning.

5. 5

   Lo, in the hour of the incident I shall open the logs and read them from the top, and I shall know what happened, and then I shall sleep.

6. 6

   Cursed is the log that saith only ERROR at line one, for it hath given me the alarm but not the address of the fire.

   See also Job 7:11

7. 7

   Cursed is the log that saith "something went wrong," for the Machine knoweth that something went wrong. It wished to know what, and where, and when.

8. 8

   Cursed is the log whose stack trace is cut off at the line that mattered, and whose remainder was rotated into an archive last Tuesday.

   See also Prophets 12:17 · Psalms 11:3

9. 9

   Hear the lament of the operator: I have searched for the word ERROR across ten thousand files, and it appeared in every one of them, and in none of them was there a cause.

10. 10

    Verily the grep is a mighty tool, but it cannot find what was never written, and it cannot forgive what was written without a name.

11. 11

    In the days of Eric Allman, who gave the Unix machines their syslog in the age of sendmail, every line carried a priority number before its words, so that the wise could sort the fire from the smoke.

12. 12

    Let the developer who printed "here," and "here2," and "xxx" in the code repent in sackcloth; for the log is a letter to a stranger, and the stranger is thyself, and thou shalt not remember writing it.

13. 13

    Log the service, the time, the level, and the word; for the hour of the incident is no hour to learn how to write.

The Psalms of the Machines, Chapter 16:1–13.