Most systems drown in meaningless WARNING logs. They waste money, obscure real errors, and help no one. Here’s why your next logging cleanup should start by deleting WARNING — and how structured logs make your production systems clearer, cheaper, and safer.
Every production system has it: a stream of WARNING logs that nobody looks at, nobody acts on, and nobody dares to delete. They clutter dashboards, inflate storage bills, and, worst of all, dilute the signal when something truly bad happens.
WARNING is the junk drawer of logging — full of "just in case" messages that neither help developers debug nor help ops keep the system healthy.
It's time we admit it: WARNING is useless.
How We Got Here
The intent behind WARNING made sense at first: it’s not an error, but it’s also not fine — that "something feels weird" state.
The problem? Nobody agrees on what that means. One team uses WARNING for deprecations. Another for retries. Another for validation edge cases. Over time, WARNING becomes a dumping ground for anything that feels uncomfortable but doesn't clearly belong in ERROR or INFO.
The result: log files and dashboards filled with yellow noise.
And when everything is WARNING, nothing is.
The Problem With WARNING
No actionability – Who's supposed to act on it? If it doesn't trigger monitoring, nobody does.
Noise overload – When millions of WARNINGs pile up, engineers stop reading them. They scroll past, eyes trained only to catch red ERRORs.
Cost – Indexing useless logs in Datadog, Splunk, or ELK burns real money.
Dilution – Real signals get buried under half-important noise.
A Better Way to Think About Logs
If you kill WARNING, you're forced to get intentional.
ERROR / CRITICAL → Unexpected Failures
If it's unexpected, it's an ERROR. Period. It should alert someone — always. They’re the logs that deserve a human to look at them.
This isn’t just text — it’s structured, filterable, and actionable. Datadog, Sentry, or PagerDuty can wake someone up for it.
INFO → Business-Relevant Events
INFO should tell the story of the business, not the code. You don’t need to know that function calculateTax()ran — you need to know that an invoice was created.
These make dashboards meaningful and help correlate application health with user-facing impact. This helps ops understand system behavior without needing to read source code.
DEBUG → Developer Insights
DEBUG is where code-level details belong. Retries, stack traces, execution paths — everything useful for debugging but irrelevant (and noisy) in production monitoring.
DEBUG logs should be off by default in production. Developers can turn them on when troubleshooting.
This is great for local debugging, but ops should never have to care.
What About "Almost Errors"?
That's where WARNING used to live. Instead of vague yellow noise, use structured metadata:
This preserves nuance without creating a meaningless log level.
What Happens When You Kill WARNING
When WARNING is gone, the log landscape gets clearer:
Ops know that ERROR means "wake up now," INFO means "business events," DEBUG means "developer-only."
Developers get cleaner dashboards — no yellow noise hiding real failures.
Costs go down because fewer useless logs are stored and indexed.
Everyone has more trust in logs because each one has a clear purpose.
Lessons Learned
Use logs for state, not steps. Logs should capture what happened, not narrate the code path. If you want code timings or call stacks, use APM tracing.
Separate ops visibility (INFO, ERROR) from developer visibility (DEBUG). They serve different needs.
Structured logging beats WARNING every time. Key/value logs give you more power than vague severity labels.
Every log line has a cost — in attention, in clarity, in money. Make sure each one buys you something valuable.
Final Reflection
I used to sprinkle WARNINGs everywhere, thinking I was being cautious. In reality, I was just adding noise.
Now my rule is simple:
ERROR for unexpected failures.
INFO for meaningful events.
DEBUG for developers.
Everything else? Log pollution.
Logs are not for therapy — they're for clarity.
