Log-it: Supporting Programming with Interactive, Contextual, Structured, and Visual Logs

Abstract

Logging is a widely used technique for inspecting and understanding programs. However, the presentation of logs still often takes its ancient form of a linear stream of text that resides in a terminal, console, or log file. Despite its simplicity, interpreting log output is often challenging due to the large number of textual logs that lack structure and context. We conducted content analysis and expert interviews to understand the practices and challenges inherent in logging. These activities demonstrated that the current representation of logs does not provide the rich structures programmers need to interpret them or the program's behavior. We present Log-it, a logging interface that enables programmers to interactively structure and visualize logs in situ. A user study with novices and experts showed that Log-it's syntax and interface have a minimal learning curve, and the interactive representations and organizations of logs help programmers easily locate, synthesize, and understand logs.