[ghshephard]

If your logs aren't text, and it's a small system, I'm not going to look at them. Therefore they don't exist. That's one reason why people don't like binary logs - they are effectively useless.

On the flip side, if the system is huge - then we can use tools like splunk.

grep/tail/awk are the first three tools I use on any system - if you create logs that I can't manipulate with those three tools, then you haven't created logs for your system that I can use.