Before the age of Disco, I once found myself in need of obtaining specific data elements from a series of log files generated by a large order processing system. Essentially, a chain of copasetic state machines would log their status while they processed various aspects of an order– line items, billing, notification, etc. It turned out that the log format was uniform– it followed a format that enabled one to understand who was writing, when it was written, and why. As you can probably imagine, the folks in operations would monitor these logs and when problems arose, they’d ping development.