Error Logging Case Study

The Business Problem

Error handling had grown piece by piece. Some failures were only logged at a low level that no one watched. Messages were written as plain text, so they were hard to search. When a product was missing from the price book, the result was often a confusing "null reference" error rather than a clear explanation. Alert emails were held in old templates, and genuine problems were mixed up with harmless "page not found" errors.

The Solution

wildesoft.net rebuilt the portal's logging around Seq, a central log server. The work included:

• Structured logs: messages are now structured, with named values such as the person or product involved, so they can be filtered and searched.
• Clearer warnings: failed calls to webCRM are raised to warnings.
• Price book problems: failed price book imports are logged as errors with full detail. When a product is missing, the system reports exactly which product and why, with a ready-to-run query for investigation.
• Alert emails: these were simplified and now ignore "page not found" errors.
• Tests: automated tests cover the new price book checks.

The Result

Problems surface in one place, with the detail needed to fix them. iTS hears about issues from the logs before resellers report them, and investigations start from the exact cause rather than guesswork.

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