Chapter 10: Logging Application Activity

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Completed provisioning ship, having received the following:

1200 lbs. celery; 2000 lbs. oranges; 760 lbs. grapefruit from G. & W. Lambert; 1008 lbs. of butter, 30,150 lbs. potatoes; 2000 lbs. onions from the Producers Co-op Dist. Society, Ltd.; 3000 lbs. beef, 600 lbs. yeast; 2400 dozen eggs; 2000 lbs. apples; 1200 lbs. cabbage, from Cervetto & Co.; 1006 lbs. pork from Hutton & Foggit Jones; 500 lbs. cheese from Maxam Cheese Products.

Inspected as to quality by Jacoby, James M., Lt.(jg) (MC), USN, & as to quantity by Davis, A. G., CCstd, USN.

—Deck log of the USS Salt Lake City (CA25), May 25, 1942

Overview

There’s no record that I can find of anything being wrong with the provisions of the USS Salt Lake City, but suppose there had been? In case of an outbreak of food poisoning, it could have been critical for the ship’s medical personnel to know which food items came from which suppliers. Software application logs are similar to this sort of routine deck log entry. For the most part, you’ll never need to refer back to the information in the log. But when something goes wrong, detailed logging can be incredibly useful. In this chapter, I’ll look at a variety of tools and techniques for keeping track of your application’s activity.

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