[erlang-questions] Developing in Erlang for customer support

[Kim]

Good day --

I am starting to learn Erlang in order to stretch my marketability in
the current job market, and to see if it could be applicable at work
(if I can convince people of that.)  I was wondering if there were any 
guidelines on writing Erlang programs with respect to providing 
customer support in the field.

Ideally, what I am looking for is an integrated testing/logging 
framework such that log files could be parsed by the test framework
to drive code simulations.  (i.e.  customer reports bug, sends log,
log is run through the framework to generate test simulation of bug,
rather than having to spend time reading a log and manually writing
tests.)  Probably more an integrated testing/telemetry framework
than a testing/logging one.  

I can find much talk about unit testing, regression testing, etc.,
and occasionally some on program logging, monitoring, statistics, 
and so forth, but I'm just wondering if anyone has tried to tie
them all together.  State machine-based frameworks coupled with 
functional programming strike me as a potentially good candidate
for developing such a framework for, so it would seem that Erlang
would be a good choice, but I'm still mulling the design issues in 
my head.  (i.e. just like mandating unit tests, requiring the
logging be able to be fed back into the unit tests.)

Hopefully I am making sense here.  If this sort of integrated framework
already exists in some form, then I would appreciate a pointer 
towards it.  This would help me explain the benefits of looking
at using Erlang at work.

(Basically, I want to not spend so much time reading log files.
Er, I mean, improve customer support by being able to (have
someone else) automatically analyze and simulate their situations 
in the field.  One of the major customer support issues I seem to
be running into is that the customers prefer to run with minimal
logging -- bug happens, no information is captured, ask customer
to turn on logging, repeat, etc. -- I'd rather the customer run with 
minimal telemtry, get the telemetry, turn that into a test simulation, 
and run the simulation with maximum debugging.)

Thank you,
Kim

-- 

Kim      bookwyrm@REDACTED                 http://solluna.org/
"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than a sincere ignorance 
and conscientious stupidity" - Martin Luther King, Jr.