Today was about closing the loop between logs, reports, and human understanding. Not adding features—making reality visible.
What I did
- Turned log analysis into an operational habit
- Formalized the idea that production logs are not just for debugging failures, but for understanding what the system actually did on a given day.
- Defined a repeatable process: read a single-day log → extract incidents → write an incident-style report.
- Designed and iterated on
alice:report:logs- Created a command that accepts a date (
YYYY-MM-DD) and generates a Markdown incident report fromstorage/logs/laravel-YYYY-MM-DD.log. - Ensured it is:
- Read-only
- Deterministic
- Safe to run repeatedly
- Honest about unknowns
- Created a command that accepts a date (
- Integrated the command into daily operations
- Scheduled it to run every day at 06:30 AM, targeting yesterday’s log.
- Added an email notification to admin when a report is successfully generated.
- Fixed a critical blind spot in the summary
- Discovered that the initial “Executive Summary” was misleading on quiet days:
- It only said “no errors,” which hides valuable operational context.
- Compared the generated summary with what I actually expect to know as an operator.
- Identified two real problems:
- Parser issue: report claiming “Total log lines: 1” strongly suggested INFO-level logs were being dropped or mis-parsed.
- Conceptual issue: summary logic treated INFO as noise instead of signal.
- Discovered that the initial “Executive Summary” was misleading on quiet days:
- Redefined what a “good” Executive Summary means
- Pushed the report to answer:“What did the system do today?”
- Required the summary to narrate:
- Video proof processing activity (ffmpeg / ffprobe pipeline)
- Homework proof uploads (images + videos)
- Scheduled maintenance jobs (media cleanup, temp cleanup)
- Finance reconciliation activity
- Teacher workflows (homework copy, attachments)
- External API usage (VietQR)
- Made it explicit that a quiet day is still a story, not an empty report.
- Improved email reporting quality
- Clarified that email summaries must be HTML + plain text, not Markdown.
- Required the full “A. Executive Summary” to be sent, not a truncated severity-only version.
- Ensured logs are treated as untrusted input and safely escaped in email.
What I learned
- “No errors” is not insight
- A system can be healthy, busy, and correct—and still produce zero ERROR/WARNING logs.
- If the summary only reports severity, it fails the operator.
- INFO logs are first-class operational signals
- In Alice, most critical workflows (uploads, processing, reconciliation) succeed quietly.
- Ignoring INFO-level logs creates false silence.
- Observability is narrative, not metrics
- Counts and tables are necessary, but insufficient.
- A human-readable narrative builds trust and shared understanding.
- Parsers lie unless proven otherwise
- A single suspicious number (“Total log lines: 1”) is a red flag.
- Every reporting tool must expose:
- total lines read
- parsed vs unparsed lines
- what it might be missing
- Production calm comes from continuity
- Daily reports create institutional memory.
- Even on boring days, writing down “nothing went wrong, and here’s what worked” matters.
Outcome
By the end of today, Alice is closer to being a self-explaining system:
- Logs → Reports → Daily understanding
- Failures treated as data
- Quiet days treated as evidence, not absence
No refactors. No new features.
Just clearer truth.