Stop Grepping Through Messy Logs — Do This Instead

Description

Still grepping through walls of plain text logs? There's a better way. Plain text logs look fine locally — but in production with dozens of services, they're nearly impossible to search, filter, or dashboard. The fix: switch to structured logging (JSON). Here's what changes: ❌ Before: INFO 2026-02-09 User 123 logged in 45ms ✅ After: {"timestamp": "...", "level": "info", "user_id": 123, "latency_ms": 45} Every log aggregator — ELK, Grafana Loki, Splunk, Datadog — can instantly parse JSON. No custom regex. No broken parsing on edge cases. Three fields you should always include: → timestamp (for correlation across services) → level (info, warn, error) → correlation/request ID (to trace a single request end-to-end) Learn more at: https://devopspath.io #devops #observability #logging #structuredlogging #sre #devopstips #grafana #cloudnative #softwareengineering #devopspathio