While our legs and backs may not have quite fully recovered yet, we are now a week since the successful Devoxx conference ended, and we thought it would be a good time to reflect on our observations.

The event itself was well run, with a friendly event team on hand and some savvy attendees, be it vendors, speakers or developers. In short, it was well worth the time going (if you’re a Java developer and didn’t attend, make sure you do next year!).

We attended as a sponsor, and ran a short15-minute presentation on the challenges of exception visibility within a locked down environment, and how OverOps can provide the visibility you would normally get within your favourite development tool. If you missed our presentation, you can download the slides below.

Our presentation had a full-house, and we could see several attendees nodding in agreement. The presentation must have worked, as we subsequently met a number of people at our stand to discuss the merits of logging strategies and how OverOps could help them and the rest of their team.

In total, I’m not sure how many people we spoke to, maybe several hundred, but it was enough for me to lose my voice over the weekend and (sadly) dream of doing quick-fire OverOps demos while trying to fall asleep!

It was good to hear from some developers logging exceptions properly, using platforms such as Splunk or ELK within their strategy, but overall it was a lot lower number than I had anticipated.

I found two main camps, those who did zero logging (!), and others who logged “some” data to flat log files. A few hadn’t given thought to security either around the logging of login credentials (tsk).

Amongst all we spoke to, we saw a common theme:

1. Teams often found they forgot to implement logging in a specific area of the solution, or they missed a key variable value used when the exception occurred.
2. Resource consumption was high on the agenda. Several admitted logging normally got switched off as the overhead was too much for the solution.
3. Often specific areas of the solution were missed, as developers simply forgot to implement the team’s chosen logging strategy.
4. Some teams have multiple logging repositories, further complicating their lives.

These gaps led to key data getting missed, resulting in extra time being spent trying to find and fix exceptions. A few admitted it had resulted in some exceptions being left unresolved, sat in their development backlog.

Hopefully, our presentation and subsequent one-on-one discussions will help drive thoughts around logging strategies, the challenges it can introduce and how OverOps can help take away the pain in both implementation, and analysis.

If you missed our Devoxx promotion to get your hands on our eBook and white paper you can still get them by clicking below.

And finally if you missed the follow up Webinar, the recording is now available to download.