Shorter identifiers for better log readability

[pmarini-nc]

It would be great to have shorter identifiers in the log. This would improve log readability and, according to a simple analysis I did, it wouldn't generate false duplicates if we were to trim the identifiers to 10 letters in a server with around 10-15 active users.

Or am I missing the reason to put the full identifier in the logs?

The analysis I did is the following:

1. output the journald log (around 500k entries, around 3 months of history)
   journalctl --output=json --output-fields=MESSAGE --unit ncsignaling > /tmp/ncsignaling.log
2. process the output with the following python script:

import pandas as pd

def find_largest(ws):
    s_out = ""
    max_len_s = len(s_out)
    for s in ws.split():
        if len(s) >= max_len_s:
            max_len_s = len(s)
            s_out = s
    if max_len_s < 20:
	    s_out = None
    return s_out

df1 = pd.read_json("ncsignaling.log", lines=True)

df1["component"] = df1.MESSAGE.str.split(":").apply(lambda x:x[0])

df2 = df1.query("component=='client.go'")

df2["msg"] = df2.MESSAGE.str.split(":").apply(lambda x:x[2])

df2["identifier"] = df2.msg.apply(find_largest)

df3=df2[df2.identifier.notnull()]

df3["short_id"] = [ identifier[:10] for identifier in df3.identifier.values]

print("Unique Identifiers: %i" % len(df3.identifier.unique()))
print("Unique Short Identifiers: %i" % len(df3.short_id.unique()))

The output is:

Unique Identifiers: 11681
Unique Short Identifiers: 11681

I'm restricting the analysis to events related to client.go for simplicity, and the analysis is naive, but I guess it makes my point clear.