Logs help provide information or aid activities in the following areas:
- Debugging
- Error recovery
- Performance tuning
- Capacity planning
- Behavior tracking and auditing
- System configuration management
- Operational status
Logs must be constructed from the perspective of their consumers. This often means you should add additional, contextual information to the log file to aid in its use. It also means you should construct a log file so that it can be easily analyzed .
Assess the operational impact and/or environment of your log files. Make certain you can handle any error situations such as insufficient disk space.