logging-best-practices

Wide events are comprehensive, single-event structured log entries per request that capture high cardinality, high dimensionality, business, and environment context together, enabling rapid root cause analysis and deep application insights.

Implement canonical log lines by consolidating scattered logs into a single JSON-formatted structured entry per request, including business context like user ID and feature flags alongside environment context for enhanced observability.

Include high cardinality and high dimensionality context such as user ID, subscription tier, feature flags, commit hash, and region in your structured JSON logs to fix production errors faster through rapid root cause analysis.

Avoid scattered logs and multiple loggers because they produce unstructured data that hinders debugging and monitoring, whereas consolidated wide events provide deep insights into application behavior during critical failures.

Yes, you can apply these logging best practices to refactor current logging implementations by transitioning unstructured data into structured JSON wide events containing business and environment context for improved debugging.

You need structured JSON logging when you require high dimensionality and business context within single log entries, replacing scattered plain text logs to enable comprehensive analytics and faster root cause analysis.