Subject: Re: Logging questions
From: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
To: Wells Oliver <woliver@padres.com>
Cc: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
In-Reply-To: <6BDF410DD500E841A60A6D183F26E26E096BBA11@svrmailbe2.padres.com>
References: <6BDF410DD500E841A60A6D183F26E26E096BBA11@svrmailbe2.padres.com>
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Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:49:04 +0200
Message-ID: <1292021344.9879.4.camel@vanquo.pezone.net>
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On fre, 2010-12-10 at 10:01 -0800, Wells Oliver wrote:
> Hello- a quick question about logging. I'm trying to set logging to the
> most minimal level possible. e.g. I really don't want to see the
> following kind of thing:
> 
> 2010-12-10 09:59:40 PST FATAL:  database "woliver" does not exist
> 
> Because... so what? Some guy forgot to supply the DB name. I've looked
> over the logging options in the documentation and they are legion. What
> are my key options to reduce logging to the lowest, most vital sort of
> messages?

The problem is, the distinction of severity is actually not so much
about what is important to you the DBA, but what is important to the
session process.  The above is important to the session process because
the session cannot continue after that error.  Other, more severe
problems will only show up as "error" because the session can continue.

So unless you want to set log_min_messages to panic, which pretty much
means that by the time you see the message your database system is dead,
you probably want to log everything at least on level error or warning
and then rely on a log analysis tool and/or other monitoring to work out
what is important to you.