Logging advice

Ok, an actual post about doing things right, instead of me venting my spleen.

So, let's talk about logging messages.

When writing logging messages for technical use - monitoring, statistics, etc, pick a separating character that is not part of the various fields you have interest in.

For example, most log messages will include a timestamp, so use of ':' is out.  Likewise, if the timestamps include the date, the '/' or '-' is right out.

A good choice for the field divider is the '|', and then the use of spaces as separation of the subfields.