Your application logs are a constant stream of information, but are they telling you the whole story? For most businesses, logs are a messy, unstructured firehose of text—invaluable for a developer debugging a specific error, but nearly useless for understanding the bigger picture.
What if, instead of logging cryptic text strings, you logged meaningful business events? What if every action—from a user signing up to an invoice being generated—was captured as a clean, structured, and analyzable data point?
This is the foundational shift that turns your logs from a technical troubleshooting tool into a strategic business asset. By treating operations as code, you create an action log that is a goldmine of operational data. With Verbs.do, this isn't just a theory; it's a built-in reality.
Let's contrast the old way with the new way. A traditional log entry might look like this:
INFO: 2023-10-27T10:00:05Z - User with id 'user_123' initiated a sign-up from IP 192.168.1.1.
This is human-readable but machine-difficult. Parsing it requires fragile regular expressions. Now, imagine capturing this as a Verb:
{
"verb": "SignUp",
"status": "succeeded",
"timestamp": "2023-10-27T10:00:05Z",
"subject": {
"type": "User",
"id": "user_123"
},
"properties": {
"email": "hello@example.com",
"ip_address": "192.168.1.1"
}
}
This structured event is instantly queryable, aggregatable, and understandable by other systems. When you build your application around these Verbs, your log stream evolves into a complete, chronological history of your entire business. It becomes an immutable system of record and a powerful engine for intelligence.
Once you have a clean stream of business actions, you can unlock insights that were previously hidden. Here are four practical techniques for analyzing your Verb stream.
The Challenge: You have a "happy path" designed for your users, but do they actually follow it? Understanding the real user journey is key to improving conversion and retention.
The Verb Solution: By analyzing the sequence of Verbs executed by a User, you can visualize real-world funnels. A typical journey might be a sequence of Verbs like:
SignUp → CreateProject → InviteTeamMember → AssignFirstTask
By querying your action log, you can easily answer critical questions:
The Insight: Discovering that 80% of new users drop off after SignUp without ever creating a project gives you a clear, data-driven mandate to redesign your onboarding flow or user dashboard.
The Challenge: System slowdowns and random failures frustrate users and can be incredibly difficult to diagnose. Finding the root cause often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack.
The Verb Solution: A structured Verb log from Verbs.do automatically captures metadata like execution_time and status (success/failure) for every single action. This makes workflow automation analysis trivial. You can run simple queries to find:
The Insight: You might find that the GenerateReport Verb is consistently slow or times out, but only when the dateRange property is greater than 90 days. You've just moved from a vague "reporting is slow" complaint to a specific, actionable performance issue to resolve.
The Challenge: Compliance audits can be a nightmare of digging through databases and correlating disconnected logs to answer one simple question: "Who did what, and when?"
The Verb Solution: Verbs.do creates an immutable audit trail by its very nature. Every executed Verb is a tamper-proof record of an action, its actor (subject), and its context.
The Insight: Fulfilling an auditor's request to "Show every instance of an Admin user executing the DeleteUser Verb in Q3" becomes a single, simple query against your Verb log. Furthermore, you can build powerful security monitoring on this stream. For example, you can set up alerts for suspicious patterns like a single user triggering multiple FailedLogin Verbs in a short period, immediately followed by a PasswordReset Verb.
The Challenge: Product development decisions are too often guided by intuition, anecdotal feedback, or the loudest person in the room.
The Verb Solution: Your Verb stream is a direct, unbiased reflection of how customers use your product. This Business-as-Code approach provides concrete data for your roadmap. Aggregate your Verb execution data to discover:
The Insight: If your data shows the ExportToCSV Verb is used 10x more than ExportToPDF, you know exactly where to invest your engineering resources for the next iteration of your export functionality.
The power of this approach lies in its simplicity. Instead of bolting on more logging, you structure your core application logic around meaningful actions. With Verbs.do, you define a Verb once, execute it anywhere in your codebase, and the deep logging, analytics, and audit trail are created for you automatically.
Stop thinking of logs as a developer-only resource. A structured action log is one of your most valuable and underutilized strategic assets.
Ready to turn your business operations into actionable intelligence? Visit Verbs.do to see how you can define, execute, and log your way to a smarter, more auditable business.