Jon Udell has some thoughts on the importance of logging.

He suggests three areas that ought to be logged more often:

Warnings. If the same warning appears repeatedly (or perhaps a set of related warnings spanning several apps), it's a sign that there's a problem with the software, or with the user's understanding of the software, or both. If we don't log these warnings, though, we can't detect patterns and respond to them.

Settings changes. As a user, how many times have you tried to remember what settings were in place when something that's broken used to work? As a developer, how many times have you tried to get users to remember what they changed? Aren't such changes important events in the life of an application, worthy of logging?

Launch and exit events. These are the most basic and obvious things to record, but we don't find them in the log. If we going to move toward "software as a service," shouldn't we keep track of what's used and how often?

I can tell you that, in my limited experience, I've not considered any time spent on logging as "wasted" and certainly have never wished, during debugging, that I had fewer logs.

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