Chapter 14: Logging and Light Observability

14.11b Retention, cost awareness and lab hygiene

By Ravindra Bagale · Last updated: 1 October 2026

Logs feel "free" until someone leaves verbose DEBUG on for a week on a busy API. You do not need invented price tables — you need habits:

1. Set an intentional retention on lab log groups (short is fine for learning).
2. Turn DEBUG off when the drill ends.
3. Prefer sampling or level filters over shipping every heartbeat forever.
4. Delete lab log groups you no longer need when the account is yours to clean.

Tiny story. Priya left LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG on a staging-like lab overnight. In the morning the log group was huge and hard to search. She dropped level to INFO, shortened retention, and documented the habit in the runbook — same lesson Capstone will demand.

Link the AWS Cloud course when you need IAM role patterns for agents; do not paste long-lived access keys into agent config files that might be committed.