The alert fires at 2am. You ssh in, open the logs, and find this: ERROR myapp: connection pool exhausted One line. The error itself, and nothing else. You know what broke. You have no idea why. Was it a sudden traffic spike? A query that held a connection too long? A retry loop that ran away? The answer was in the DEBUG logs — but you turned those off six months ago because the noise was unbearable. Then there's the other version of this problem. A teammate pings you: "hey, can you send me the error log for that failure yesterday?" You zip it up and send it over. They come back ten minutes later: "this just has the error line, there's no context here." You know they're right. You don't have anything better to send them. The conversation stalls because the information was never captured in the first place. The logging level trap Every Python developer eventually ends up in the same place. You start with DEBUG because you want visibility. The files balloon.…