Logging
The recording of structured events and diagnostic information produced by software and infrastructure.
Plain English
Applications write useful records of what happened so people and tools can investigate behavior.
In context
Effective logging chooses meaningful events context severity privacy controls retention and correlation identifiers without exposing secrets or overwhelming operators.
Example
“Structured logging let the on-call engineer trace the failed request across services.”
When you'll hear this
- debugging
- incident response
- security monitoring
Common misunderstanding
More log volume does not automatically improve observability and sensitive data should not be logged carelessly.
Also known as
application logginglog collection
Commonly used by
Related terms
Updated: 2026-08-27
