The practice of periodically storing program status running on a computer into a file for later analysis.

Acts as an audit trail to track events. Often contains Metadata

Types of Logs

  • Event : OS events like startup, application errors, shutdown
  • Application : Logs that developers can set up
  • Security: Logs authentication and priviledges of resources.
  • System: Logs for document-level system events like driver or hardware errors
  • Setup: Logs for updating software or hardware

Concepts