Re: add recovery, backup, archive, streaming etc. activity messages to server logs along with ps display

On Thu, Nov 11, 2021 at 1:40 AM Euler Taveira <euler(at)eulerto(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Nov 10, 2021, at 2:38 PM, Bharath Rupireddy wrote:
>
> As discussed in [1], isn't it a better idea to add some of activity
> messages [2] such as recovery, archive, backup, streaming etc. to
> server logs at LOG level? They are currently being set into ps display
> which is good if the postgres is being run on a standalone box/VM
> where users can see the ps display, but it doesn't help much in case
> the postgres is being run on a cloud environment where users don't
> have access to ps display output. Moreover, the ps display is
> transient and will not help to analyze after an issue occurs.
>
> Besides recovery, the other activities already provide information through
> views. I might be missing something but it seems the current views already
> provide the information that ps displays.
>
> Having the above messages in the server logs will be useful to
> understand how the system is/was doing/progressing with these
> (sometimes time-intensive) operations.
>
> It could be useful for a root cause analysis, however, you are also increasing
> the number of LOG messages in a system that doesn't/won't require such
> information. It is fine to add additional DEBUG messages if there isn't a
> similar one yet. If at least the message level were module-controlled, you
> could modify a setting to gather more messages from a specific module.
> Unfortunately, that's not possible so we should avoid superfluous messages.

Yes, at least having the messages at DEBUG1 level would help do the
RCA after an issue occurs. Please see my response upthread at [1].

[1] - https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CALj2ACXVwnHhek9bo9wgamtW9SBinj4ohF1f1Yf3Su2o5WarWg%40mail.gmail.com

Regards,
Bharath Rupireddy.