logging - When to use the different log levels

Question

There are different ways to log messages, in order of fatality:

1. FATAL

2. ERROR

3. WARN

4. INFO

5. DEBUG

6. TRACE

How do I decide when to use which?

What's a good heuristic to use?

Answer 1

I generally subscribe to the following convention:

• Trace - Only when I would be "tracing" the code and trying to find one part of a function specifically.
• Debug - Information that is diagnostically helpful to people more than just developers (IT, sysadmins, etc.).
• Info - Generally useful information to log (service start/stop, configuration assumptions, etc). Info I want to always have available but usually don't care about under normal circumstances. This is my out-of-the-box config level.
• Warn - Anything that can potentially cause application oddities, but for which I am automatically recovering. (Such as switching from a primary to backup server, retrying an operation, missing secondary data, etc.)
• Error - Any error which is fatal to the operation, but not the service or application (can't open a required file, missing data, etc.). These errors will force user (administrator, or direct user) intervention. These are usually reserved (in my apps) for incorrect connection strings, missing services, etc.
• Fatal - Any error that is forcing a shutdown of the service or application to prevent data loss (or further data loss). I reserve these only for the most heinous errors and situations where there is guaranteed to have been data corruption or loss.