Application Logging
Application logging is the practice of recording events, errors, and informational messages generated by software during its execution. It involves writing structured or unstructured log data to various outputs like files, databases, or monitoring systems. This provides a chronological record of application behavior for debugging, monitoring, and auditing purposes.
Developers should implement logging to diagnose issues in production environments where debugging tools are unavailable, enabling faster troubleshooting and root cause analysis. It's essential for monitoring application health, tracking user activities for security audits, and gathering metrics for performance optimization. Logging is critical in distributed systems to trace requests across multiple services.