Structured Logging

Best practices for production-ready logging in Node.js applications using Pino and structured JSON output.

Philosophy

Logs are data, not text. Structured logging treats every log entry as a queryable data point, enabling powerful analysis, alerting, and debugging in production.

Three core principles:

1. Machine-readable first: JSON structure enables programmatic querying
2. Context-rich: Include all relevant metadata (correlation IDs, user IDs, request info)
3. Security-conscious: Never log sensitive data (passwords, tokens, PII)

Why Pino