Designing a Logging Strategy: ELK vs. Structured Logging

Avoid console.log in production; use structured logging (JSON) with libraries like pino or winston for easy ingestion into ELK/Datadog.

Text-based logs are hard to search. Structured logging outputs every log as a JSON object with metadata (level, timestamp, requestId, serviceId). This allows tools like Elasticsearch to index specific fields. Senior-level logging also includes 'Log Levels' (debug, info, warn, error) to filter noise in production.