Understanding Error Logs

Legacy 1.0.x Understanding Error Logs

Here's a quick set of notes about error messages/logs

Introduction

I decided it might be useful to have a list of the error message levels and which you should be concerned with.

Log levels

• Notice: Talks about something that someone may find interest to look at but are normal and of no real concern usually.
• Warning: Something probably went wrong but the program could continue to run. Can mean an bug in the program or just some bad input and output (GIGO).
• Error: Something went wrong and the program stopped running. Usually a bug in the program that needs fixed. Can be cause by either logic error or getting unexpected data that wasn't taken into consideration by programmer in program which probably needs to be fixed also.
• Exception: Similar to a warning and usually used to handle something that might cause an error if it hadn't been caught by the programmer and handled in some way.
• Uncaught exception: This is a exception that happens when the programmer some how missed handling an exception but was smart enough to add something to let him know he missed it.

From the above the only ones that normally need to be worried about are warnings, errors, and uncaught exception and be reported as they will need to be fixed or at least figured out why they have happened. Notices and exception are mostly use to help figure out where something went wrong or right, or just so you know something is really happening.