Using Debug Logs Efficiently for Tracking Errors

Question

A general question. We all put some System.debug() statements in our controllers for error handling, for info messages, etc.
But there are plenty of logs in the system. When some exception throws, how to narrow down to the correct log file to look at? Or do anyone using another proper mechanism to handling errors other than using custom objects?

Answer 1

I usually put ### in debug statements which helps in searching for debug statements in logs Or use can search USER_DEBUG in log for debug statements

Example:

System.debug('Opportunity Id #####'+o.Id);

Or In developer console you can Open the log for your latest action, then filter to show Debug Only

Answer 2

Well, this is a big topic but a few points:

1. Unless you have debug monitoring turned on for the running user, exceptions and logs won't exist anywhere - you'll need the user to be monitored and then repeat the use case
2. Alternatively (and I can suggest Dan Appleman's Advanced Apex book by way of suggestion), you can implement a logging pattern wherein interesting things in your controllers of interest are written to a custom Log__c object for later analysis. This is even more helpful with async operations including batchables, queuables, future, ...
3. And good practice is of course to wrap with try-catch where you can and using the catch block to issue useful diagnostics to the sysad and/or user (to forward to the sysad)
4. I personally make all my system.debug(...) statements as System.debug(LoggingLevel.INFO,...) to avoid DEBUG noise in the sfdc-generated log. I also add reusable methods within my classes called debug() that return nicely-formatted, captioned strings of relevant local object values that can be used in producing a more human-meaningful log or diagnostics - this can help a lot in complex transactions or when returning to code that you haven't looked at for months or years.