One of the major developments in software design and delivery over the last few years has been a movement away from monolith applications towards microservices. One of the sticking points I’ve seen on numerous microservice applications is logging. There are some unique challenges with microservice logging that need to be addressed. In this article, we’ll look at how we can make logging in a microservice as painless as in a monolith.

Logging is an important topic in software development, especially if you need to analyze bugs and other unexpected events in your production environment. Implementing your logging often seems easy. But as you probably experienced yourself, logging is far more complex than it might seem. That’s why you can find lots of articles about it here on the blog.

One of the most important aspects of developing an efficient system is to have clean, helpful logs that will help you understand what errors are being triggered, and what information is being processed. When you are first creating an application, you might not know what logging framework will be most suitable for your future needs, or you could simply want your system to remain agnostic regarding the logging implementation to be used.

Let’s begin with a little thought experiment. Imagine you’re responsible for the next release of your company’s flagship product, and today is the big day: you’re about to give a demo presentation for all the big shots in the company. The CTO is obviously there, since she’s your boss. The CEO is there as well, along with the VP of Marketing and some of the company’s investors. So, that’s your boss, your boss’s boss, and the moneymakers.