You can easily filter messages sent to error_log() using "tail" and "grep" on *nix systems. This makes monitoring debug messages easy to see during development.
Be sure to "tag" your error message with a unique string so you can filter it using "grep":
In your code:
error_log("DevSys1 - FirstName: $FirstName - LastName: $Lastname");
On your command line:
tail -f /var/log/httpd/error_log | grep DevSys1
In this example, we pipe apache log output to grep (STDIN) which filters it for you only showing messages that contain "DevSys1".
The "-f" option means "follow" which streams all new log entries to your terminal or to any piped command that follows, in this case "grep".
