Whilst I found myself agreeing with most of Jeff Atwood’s post The Problem With Logging, I strongly disagree with his third point:
If it’s worth saving to a logfile, it’s worth showing in the user interface. This is the paradox: if the information you’re logging is at all valuable, it deserves to be surfaced in the application itself, not buried in an anonymous logfile somewhere. Even if it’s just for administrators. Logfiles are all too often where useful data goes to die, alone, unloved and ignored.
This fails to take into consideration the two very distinct types of error messages that an application should have: administrator focused and user focused. Both of these error messages can be triggered by the same error condition. A problem occurs when you display administrator focused messages to the user: anyone that has come across largely meaningless error codes rather than a friendly human-readable language has experienced this less-than-valuable approach to logging.
Good error messages are essential to any application, and so are adminstrator focused messages, but let’s remember these are two very distinct features and need to be separated as necessary.
Glen Scott
I’m a freelance software developer with 18 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.
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I completely agree, all too often (with microsoft apps especially) I am asked to decode error messages that are simply meaningless numbers until you look them up on a website, and even that doesn’t always lead to an immediate solution.