Like all subjective decisions in technology, which log level to use is the cause of much angry debate. Worse, different logging systems use different levels: Log4j has 6 severity levels, and Syslog has 8 severity levels. While both lists of log levels come with guidance as to which level to use when, there's still enough ambiguity to cause confusion.

When choosing a log level, it's important to know how visible you want the message to be, how big of a problem it is, and what you want the user to do about it. With that in mind, this is the decision tree I follow when choosing a log level: