# Improving Alerting/Logging in GN2

## Problem Statement

Current logging in the genenetwork ecosystem is noisy and difficult to parse programatically which makes it hard to:

* Integrate logs into some observability pipeline (E.g. sheepdog).
* Troubleshoot issues as they occur.  We always learn of bugs from users.

## Goals

* Standardize logging format and config across GN2 flask apps and gn-guile.
* Adopt structured logging.
* Extend sheep-dog to be able to parse gn logs and send alerts on e-mail or matrix.

### Non-goals

* Logging in GN3.
* Parsing logs to extract goals.
* Getting rid of "gn.db" global object and in so doing removing "MySqlAlchemy" [that we really shouldn't be using].
* Adding log messages to existing functions.

## Actual Design

* Get rid of "utility.logger" module and replace it with Flask's or Python's in-built logging.
* Configure the logging system to automatically add the module name, line number, time-stamps etc.
* Use a better format for displaying the logs.
* Delete "with Bench..." calls.

## Resources

=> https://realpython.com/python-logging/ Logging in Python
=> https://signoz.io/guides/python-logging-best-practices/ Python Logging Best Practices - Obvious and Not-So-Obvious
=> https://signoz.io/blog/what-is-opentelemetry/ What is OpenTelemetry