[m0hit]

Have you looked into https://brandur.org/logfmt?

Having lived with various points between the 'awesome to read' and 'simplest to parse' I currently favor simpler parsing and investing in tooling that makes manual parsing of logs easier.

Of course the decision should include the scale of the microservices. There would be no benefit in optimizing too much for readability if the number of requests to your services is so high that you would need complex filtering before you can look at them.

Another way to cut down the bike shedding is to go with a library that wraps around the format you choose. We built GitHub.com/clever/Kayvee and have changed the format a few times. However since everyone uses the kayvee libraries at Clever it's not too crazy to change the format.

Hopefully this was useful. Apologies for the disconnected paragraphs - on public transit :)