Re: Notes on testing Postgres 10b1

On 06/07/2017 06:37 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 6/7/17 21:19, Josh Berkus wrote:
>> The user's first thought is going to be a network issue, or a bug, or
>> some other problem, not a missing PK. Yeah, they can find that
>> information in the logs, but only if they think to look for it in the
>> first place, and in some environments (AWS, containers, etc.) logs can
>> be very hard to access.
>
> You're not going to get very far with using this feature if you are not
> looking in the logs for errors. These are asynchronously operating
> background workers, so the only way they can communicate problems is
> through the log.

Well, we *could* provide a system view, as we now do for archiving, and
for the same reasons.

The issue isn't that the error detail is in the log. It's somehow
letting the user know that they need to look at the log, as opposed to
somewhere else. Consider that this is asynchonous for the user as well;
they are likely to find out about the broken replication well after it
happens, and thus have a lot of log to search through.

Activity logs are a *terrible* UI for debugging systems problems. I
realize that there is information it's hard for us to provide any other
way. But the logs should be our "monitoring of last resort", where we
put stuff after we've run out of ideas on where else to put it, because
they are the hardest thing to access for a user.

--
Josh Berkus
Containers & Databases Oh My!