Rails Logs: A Blessing in Development, a Headache in Production

Rails logs are invaluable in development but become unwieldy in production with compressed files, mixed requests, and no context. The post covers practical strategies to fix this: switching to JSON structured logs via Lograge, leveraging Rails 7+ request IDs to trace requests, configuring log rotation, adding rich context per line, and using tools like lnav, Loki+Grafana, Datadog, or Honeycomb for aggregation and querying. Includes shell aliases and config snippets, plus a tiered tool recommendation based on server count and traffic.