Observability Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published May 19, 2026 4 min read

DEBUG vs INFO vs WARN: Use Them Right

Most teams misuse log levels. The right discipline by level, with examples of what should land where.

DEBUG

Off in production. Used in dev to trace execution.

If you find yourself enabling debug in prod to debug an issue, the issue is that you have insufficient INFO.

Significant events: requests received, responses sent, jobs completed. Useful for tracing real production flows.

Volume: significant but bounded. Manage with sampling on high-traffic endpoints.

Recoverable issues: retries, fallbacks, deprecation warnings.

Anyone reading WARN should consider it actionable; otherwise it is INFO.