#pragma page-filename DEV/versions/163909 = Improved Logging = The next major release of Mailman uses Python's [[http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-logging.html|logging module]] for all log writing. Logging will also be easilly configurable by usimg a `LOG_CONFIG_FILE` which will let you customize log levels for the various log files Mailman writes, as well as log formats and such. However, currently Mailman doesn't log any more or less information than it did in Mailman 2.1. This page will collect thoughts on how to improve Mailman's logging so that site administrators, list owners, and users can better utilize this useful information. == Separate loggers == Mailman 2.1 uses a number of separate logging streams to separate out such information as postings, smtp successes and failures, lock debugging, errors (tracebacks), etc. Do people like this, and should we keep this for Mailman 3.0? OT1H it's nice to be able to just view the log you care about without all that information being conflated, but OTOH, it means more files to inspect. I'd like to hear your thoughts on that. Oh, I should mention that it ought to be possible via the `LOG_CONFIG_FILE` to specify that any combination of the separate loggers output to the same log file. That might be enough to address this for all use cases. == Information to log == What does Mailman currently log that you have no need for, or that clutters up your automated processing of the log files? How could Mailman's log formats be improved for tools such as `grep` or other system administration tools? What information does Mailman currently ''not'' log that would be useful ''to'' log? You system administrators out there, what are you missing that would make your lives easier? == Access to log data == Currently, only site administrators have access to Mailman's log information via the file system. However, some of this information (or new information we start logging) could be very useful to list administrators and users. For example, list owners might like to get some metrics on their list's traffic. How many posts per day, week, month do they see? What is the distribution of user activity? How big on average is their held queue? Users might find some interesting information in some of the log data too. Which lists are they most active on and by how much? Which lists get the most and least traffic? Before they subscribe, a user might want to get a sense of how much email they will get. == Your comments == Please post your comments below. I'd like to get a sense for what people want to see and then we can modify these pages to include a more formal specification for improving Mailman's logging. Separate Loggers:  It would be nice if it were possible to get all logs in 1 place, and in a format that was consistent enough to aid writing a good log parser to generate traffic reports from.<
> Access to log data:  I don't think list owners need access to the logs themselves, but it would be great to be able to offer traffic stats of some kind.  Hopefully that output from that system would use the same templating system being discussed for mailman itself.<
> – acrosman ---- <>