Has anyone worked in an environment where program logs were placed in a central location so support people can easily access them? Does central logging work well, or is it generally too much effort for too few gains?

I work with a group that creates bioinformatics applications with perl and have been been asked whether a central logging system is both feasible and useful. These applications typically call both commercial and open source applications as part of their operation. Some of these don't behave well and/or change often, so it can be an effort to create logs that are both useful and make sense so someone other than the author.

I'm guessing that central logs could help support people isolate general problems, but that in most cases authors would need to be called to interpret application errors. It also likely depends on the experience and background of the support people. What do you think?

In reply to Central logging methods and thoughts by bwelch

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