🧭 Python Logging Mastery Roadmap
🟢 Phase 1: Logging Basics
Goal: Understand how logging works and replace print statements with proper logging.
Topics:
What is logging? Why not just use print() ?
Logging vs. debugging vs. error handling
The logging module: core idea
Logging levels: DEBUG , INFO , WARNING , ERROR , CRITICAL
Basic logging config: logging.basicConfig()
Simple use cases with logging.debug() etc.
🟡 Phase 2: Formatting and Configuration
Goal: Make logs useful and readable.
Topics:
Log message formatting ( %(levelname)s , %(asctime)s , etc.)
Using format and datefmt in basicConfig
Logging to a file
Logging to multiple destinations (console + file)
Logging with different levels per handler
🟠 Phase 3: Logging Handlers, Formatters, and Advanced Config
Goal: Understand how Python builds scalable logging systems.
Topics:
Handlers ( StreamHandler , FileHandler , RotatingFileHandler , SMTPHandler , etc.)
Formatters (custom log message formats)
Filters (control what gets logged)
Using Logger objects vs root logger
Hierarchical loggers (e.g. app.module.submodule )
External config with logging.config.dictConfig
🔴 Phase 4: Real-world Logging Practices for Software Dev
Goal: Build logging that’s production-ready.
Topics:
Logging exceptions properly ( exc_info=True )
Contextual logging using extra and LoggerAdapter
Logging in multithreaded/multiprocess code
Avoiding common mistakes (e.g., multiple handlers, duplicated logs)
Logging in libraries vs applications
Best practices for logging in packages
Logging JSON for structured logs
Integration with log aggregators (e.g. ELK stack, Sentry, Datadog)
🟣 Phase 5: Unit Testing and Debugging with Logging
Goal: Test logs and debug with style.
Topics:
Capturing logs in unit tests ( caplog , unittest )
Mocks and asserting logs
Temporary log configs in tests
Logging during pytest runs
Tracing complex bugs with dynamic log levels
🧠 Practice: 10–20 Problems Covering All Phases
You'll get hands-on with problems like:
# Problem Idea
1 Replace print() with logging in a simple script
2 Create a logging config that logs DEBUG+ to file and WARNING+ to console
3 Log user login attempts with timestamp and IP
4 Rotate logs daily and keep 7 days of backups
5 Use contextual logging ( extra ) to log session ID per request
6 Log exceptions in a try-except block properly
7 Setup and use a LoggerAdapter
8 Log output in a multithreaded crawler
9 Use dictConfig to build a JSON-based logging setup
10 Write unit tests that assert logging calls
11 Integrate logs with an external service (mocked)
12 Configure per-module loggers with different levels
13 Prevent duplicate log entries when importing modules
14 Benchmark logging performance with and without isEnabledFor()
15 Use filters to only log messages containing a keyword
16 Build a logging middleware for a web app (e.g. FastAPI)
17 Structure logs in JSON for parsing by ELK stack
18 Log database queries in an ORM-like setup
19 Use logging for performance monitoring (e.g., log slow calls)
20 Capture logs during a failing unit test suite
