Log level inflation: debugging data is output as info

[majick]

It's always something of a subjective thing, but by and large a UNIX program should produce no output if it is successful in the most expected way. It should emit info if something interesting happened, and warn or error if something unexpected happened. The below log lines fall into none of those categories and are, frankly, debugging output:

Aug 16 07:39:55 adorable pihole_exporter-linux-arm[24727]: time="2022-08-16T07:39:55-07:00" level=info msg="request.Header: map[Accept:[application/openmetrics-text;version=1.0.0,application/openmetrics-text;version=0.0.1;q=0.75,text/plain;version=0.0.4;q=0.5,*/*;q=0.1] Accept-Encoding:[gzip] User-Agent:[Prometheus/2.37.0] X-Prometheus-Scrape-Timeout-Seconds:[10]]\n"
Aug 16 07:39:55 adorable pihole_exporter-linux-arm[24727]: time="2022-08-16T07:39:55-07:00" level=info msg="Collecting from 127.0.0.1"
Aug 16 07:39:55 adorable pihole_exporter-linux-arm[24727]: time="2022-08-16T07:39:55-07:00" level=info msg="New tick of statistics from 127.0.0.1: 1936 ads blocked / 3313 total DNS queries"

My case for each of these log lines to be debugging output that is suppressed:

1. A request header is unambiguously debug output that should never be written to disk.
2. The daemon is doing it's job, collecting. That's probably not worth wearing a hole in one of my flash cells every 60 seconds about.
3. The statistics printed here are, quite literally, the data that the daemon is going to offer my scraper. There might be a reasonable debate to be had about logging whenever the data changes but I'm pretty sure it's going to change any time FTL is polled and is pretty unremarkable information.

Over 90% of the contents of daemon.log are from pihole_exporter because of pointless log spam.

[moritzj29]

would be really nice to be able to set the log level