1. For us, support emails are always sent to a list rather than to an individual
2. We are actively working on clarifying and refining the message so that the nature of the problem and the steps taken to resolve it are clear. It’s surprisingly hard to create good error messages, and it’s often not obvious what’s required until after the problem happens a few times (in production). Releasing every week gives plenty of opportunity to refine this.

Regarding log file analysis, it’s hugely useful feedback for to both development and the business about how the site is performing and how the users are using it.

This seems good but we suffer quite seriously with two problems resulting from this approach — both of which are longer term maintenance issues:

1. the email was sent to an individual as well as a distribution list; the individual left the company and the distribution list is not proactively managed. The end result, the alerts were lost, ignored and not effective

2. Over the course of time, the exact code that generates the error has been forgotten. No one still working here can tell me what the error message means or where in our infrastructure it is being generated. We ended up on an archeological expidition to find the stupid things.

I don’t think either of these issues are unexpected and, in fact, managing these issues is closely related the the main point of your post.

My comment simply re-enforces the need to maintain the alerts otherwise, you may end up like us where the email alerts have become part of our overwhelming technical debt.

PS: we are making terrific use our our logs to extract performance metrics about our site. HR

Heather