Comment by flukus
4 years ago
> I've never seen any production data for the app I work on.
The rest I agree with you, at least in a perfect world, but not allowed to look at production data? In the jobs I've had recently I wouldn't even be able to hypothesize what the problem is without looking at production data and production logs. Some of the issues wouldn't even have been reported if I wasn't checking the logs.
How do you bridge the gap from problem to replication and/or something actionable? Do you have someone knowledgeable enough in a role where they can feed you this information?
I guess the poster meant production customer data. Production logs and metrics should be easy to access, but customer data should be highly privileges and definitely not present in logs. At my old employer viewing production customer database required a customer support escalation.
The rest I agree with you, at least in a perfect world, but not allowed to look at production data?
For some context, the app is all about visualising corporate and legal structures at global law firms, so it's all very private and very secure. Never having access to production data to replicate issues certainly makes debugging a bit harder, but it's never been so complex that we've not been about to figure out what's happened. I've learned a lot about understanding how an application works, how data flows through it, and intuitively zeroing in on a likely problem area while I've worked on it.
It's a lot of effort, but you can make a system like this work.
Eg Google does for example.
(SREs can still look at some metadata of the running system, like load etc.
Logs themselves have to be carefully anonymized.
The data itself is almost completly off-limits.)