Ezlog

Ezlog is intended to be a zero-configuration structured logging setup for pure Ruby or Ruby on Rails projects using any (or all) of the following libraries or frameworks:

• Ruby on Rails (5.x and 6.x supported)
• Sidekiq
• Sequel
• Rack::Timeout

It uses Tim Pease's wonderful Logging gem under the hood for an all-purpose structured logging solution.

Ezlog's purpose is threefold:

1. Make sure that our applications are logging in a concise and sensible manner; emitting no unnecessary "noise" but containing all relevant and necessary information (like timing).
2. Make sure that all log messages are written to STDOUT in a machine-processable format (JSON) across all of our projects.
3. Achieving the above goals should require no configuration in the projects where the library is used.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'ezlog'

Although Ezlog sets up sensible defaults for all logging configuration settings, it leaves you the option to override these settings manually in the way you're used to; via Rails's configuration mechanism. Unfortunately the Rails new project generator automatically generates code for the production environment configuration that overrides these settings.

For Ezlog to work properly, you also need to delete the logging configuration options in the config/environments/production.rb generated file.

At the moment Ezlog only support Rails apps. Non-Rails support is planned.

• Initializes the Logging library
• Configures Rails's logging
• Configures Sidekiq logging
• Configures Sequel logging
• Configures Rack::Timeout logging
• Provides support for adding context information to log messages
• Provides testing support for RSpec

Ezlog sets up Logging's root logger to have an appender that writes to STDOUT. Any loggers created by the application will inherit this appender and will thus write their logs to STDOUT. Ezlog also comes with its own log layout, which it uses to output messages sent to the STDOUT appender. This layout does several very useful things to make our lives easier:

• It can handle log messages in several formats:
  • String (obviously)
  • Hash
  • Exception
  • any object that can be coerced into a String
• It automatically adds basic information to all log messages, such as:
  • name of the logger
  • timestamp
  • log level (as string)
  • hostname
  • PID

Examples:

logger.info 'Log message'
#=> {"logger":"App","timestamp":"2019-05-11T16:08:38+02:00","level":"INFO","hostname":"MacbookPro.local","pid":71674,"message":"Log message"}

logger.info message: 'Job finished', duration: 2
#=> {"logger":"App","timestamp":"2019-05-11T16:08:38+02:00","level":"INFO","hostname":"MacbookPro.local","pid":71674,"message":"Job finished","duration":2}

logger.error ex
#=> {"logger":"App","timestamp":"2019-05-11T16:08:38+02:00","level":"ERROR","hostname":"MacbookPro.local","pid":71674,"message":"Error message","error":{"class":"StandardError","message":"Error message","backtrace":[...]}}

Ezlog configures the Rails.logger to be an instance of a Logging logger by the name of Application, behaving as described above.

In addition to this, Ezlog also does the following:

• It adds the environment (Rails.env) to the logger's initial context, so it will automatically be appended to all log messages emitted by the application.
• It disables Rails's default logging of uncaught errors and injects its own error logger into the application, which
  • logs 1 line per error, including the error's name and context (stack trace, etc.),
  • logs every error at ERROR level instead of the default FATAL.
  • does not log exceptions which are handled by Rails (ActionDispatch::ExceptionWrapper.rescue_responses)
• It disables Rails's default request logging, which logs several lines per event during the processing of an action, and replaces the default Rack access log with its own access log middleware. The end result is an access log that
  • contains all relevant information (request ID, method, path, params, client IP, duration and response status code), and
  • has 1 log line per request, logged at the end of the request.

Thanks to Mathias Meyer for writing Lograge, which inspired the solution. If Ezlog's not your cup of tea but you're looking for a way to tame Rails's logging then be sure to check out Lograge.

GET /welcome?subsession_id=34ea8596f9764f475f81158667bc2654

With default Rails logging:

Started GET "/welcome?subsession_id=34ea8596f9764f475f81158667bc2654" for 127.0.0.1 at 2019-06-08 08:49:31 +0200
Processing by PagesController#welcome as HTML
  Parameters: {"subsession_id"=>"34ea8596f9764f475f81158667bc2654"}
  Rendering pages/welcome.html.haml within layouts/application
  Rendered pages/welcome.html.haml within layouts/application (5.5ms)
Completed 200 OK in 31ms (Views: 27.3ms | ActiveRecord: 0.0ms)

With Ezlog:

{"logger":"AccessLog","timestamp":"2019-06-08T08:49:31+02:00","level":"INFO","hostname":"MacbookPro.local","pid":75463,"environment":"development","request_id":"9a43631b-284c-4677-9d08-9c1cc5c7d3a7","duration_sec":0.031,"message":"GET /welcome?subsession_id=34ea8596f9764f475f81158667bc2654 - 200 (OK)","remote_ip":"127.0.0.1","method":"GET","path":"/welcome?subsession_id=34ea8596f9764f475f81158667bc2654","params":{"subsession_id":"34ea8596f9764f475f81158667bc2654","controller":"pages","action":"welcome"},"response_status_code":200}

By default, Ezlog logs all request parameters as a hash (JSON object) under the params key. This is very convenient in a structured logging system and makes it easy to search for specific request parameter values e.g. in ElasticSearch (should you happen to store your logs there). Unfortunately, in some cases - such as when handling large forms - this can create quite a bit of noise and impact the searchability of your logs negatively. For this reason, you have the option to restrict which parameters get logged by adding something like the following to your application's configuration:

config.ezlog.log_only_whitelisted_params = true  # default is false
config.ezlog.whitelisted_params = [:action]      # default is [:controller, :action]

Using this configuration, Ezlog will only log the action parameter under the params key, but will still log all parameters serialized into a single string under the key params_serialized. You won't lose any information, but you can make sure that only the relevant parameters of your requests are searchable (and thus protect your logs).

Should you want to exclude certain paths (e.g. a healthcheck URL) from your access logs, you can use the following option:

config.ezlog.exclude_paths = ['/healthcheck', %r(/monitoring/.*)]  # default is empty so everything gets logged

The logger's log level is determined as follows (in order of precedence):

• the log level set in the application's configuration,
• the LOG_LEVEL environment variable, or
• INFO as the default log level if none of the above are set.

The following log levels are available: DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL.

Ezlog configures the Sidekiq.logger to be an instance of a Logging logger by the name of Sidekiq, behaving as described above. The logger uses the same log level as the Rails logger (see above). Ezlog also comes with its own job logger for Sidekiq which does several things that come in very handy when working with background jobs.

• It emits two log messages per job run; one when the job is started and another one when the job is finished (successfully or unsuccessfuly).
• It measures the time it took to execute the job and appends the benchmark information to the final log message.
• It adds all basic information about the job (worker, queue, JID, created_at, enqueued_at, run_count) to the log context so all log messages emitted during the execution of the job will contain this information.
• It also adds all of the job's parameters (by name) to the log context, which means that all log messages emitted during the execution of the job will contain this information as well.

class TestWorker
  include Sidekiq::Worker

  def perform(customer_id)
    logger.warn 'Customer not found'
  end
end

TestWorker.perform_async 42

#=> {"logger":"Sidekiq","timestamp":"2019-05-12T10:38:10+02:00","level":"INFO","hostname":"MacbookPro.local","pid":75538,"jid":"abcdef1234567890","queue":"default","worker":"TestWorker","created_at":"2019-05-12 10:38:10 +0200","enqueued_at":"2019-05-12 10:38:10 +0200","run_count":1,"customer_id":42,"message":"TestWorker started"}
#=> {"logger":"Sidekiq","timestamp":"2019-05-12T10:38:10+02:00","level":"WARN","hostname":"MacbookPro.local","pid":75538,"jid":"abcdef1234567890","queue":"default","worker":"TestWorker","created_at":"2019-05-12 10:38:10 +0200","enqueued_at":"2019-05-12 10:38:10 +0200","run_count":1,"customer_id":42,"message":"Customer not found"}
#=> {"logger":"Sidekiq","timestamp":"2019-05-12T10:38:12+02:00","level":"INFO","hostname":"MacbookPro.local","pid":75538,"jid":"abcdef1234567890","queue":"default","worker":"TestWorker","created_at":"2019-05-12 10:38:10 +0200","enqueued_at":"2019-05-12 10:38:10 +0200","run_count":1,"customer_id":42,"duration_sec":2.667,"message":"TestWorker finished"}

Ezlog adds a logging extension to Sequel that appends a logger to any newly opened database connection. This logger is an instance of a Logging logger by the name of Sequel, behaving as described above. It also sets Sequel's sql_log_level to debug.

This extension isn't enabled by default, because Sequel logging isn't necessarily needed in every project. You can enable it by adding the following line to your application's configuration:

config.ezlog.enable_sequel_logging = true

Rack::Timeout is a very useful tool for people running services on Heroku but it is way too verbose by default and all of its important messages (i.e. Timeout errors) are logged by the application as well. For this reason, Ezlog turns off Rack::Timeout logging completely.

Ezlog provides two helper methods which can be used to add context information to log messages:

• within_log_context(context): Starts a new log context initialized with context and executes the provided block within that context. Once execution is finished, the log context is cleaned up and the previous context (if any) is reinstated. In practice, this means that every time we log something (within the block), the log message will include the information that's in the current context. This can be useful for storing request-specific information (request ID, user ID, ...) in the log context early on (for example in a middleware) and not have to worry about including it every time we want to log a message.

  Example:

  within_log_context customer_id: 1234 do
    Rails.logger.info 'test 1'
  end
  Rails.logger.info 'test 2'
  
  #=> {...,"level":"INFO","customer_id":1234,"message":"test 1"}
  #=> {...,"level":"INFO","message":"test 2"}

• add_to_log_context(context): Adds the provided context to the current log context but provides no mechanism for removing it later. Only use this method if you are sure that you're working within a specific log context and that it will be cleaned up later (e.g. by only using this method in a block passed to the previously explained within_log_context method).

You can access these methods either in the global scope by calling them via Ezlog.within_log_context and Ezlog.add_to_log_context or locally by including the Ezlog::LogContextHelper module into your class/module.

Ezlog comes with built-in support for testing your logging activity using RSpec. To enable spec support for Ezlog, put this line in your spec_helper.rb or rails_helper.rb:

require "ezlog/rspec"

What you get:

• Helpers
  • log_output provides access to the complete log output in your specs
  • log_output_is_expected shorthand for writing expectations for the log output
• Matchers
  • include_log_message matcher for expecting a certain message in the log output
  • log matcher for expecting an operation to log a certain message

# Check that the log contains a certain message
expect(log_output).to include_log_message message: 'Test message'
log_output_is_expected.to include_log_message message: 'Test message'

# Check that the message is not present in the logs before the operation but is present after it 
expect { operation }.to log message: 'Test message', 
                            user_id: 123456 

# Expect a certain log level
log_output_is_expected.to include_log_message(message: 'Test message').at_level(:info)
expect { operation }.to log(message: 'Test message').at_level(:info)

Ezlog is highly opinionated software and does in no way aim or claim to be useful for everyone. Use at your own discretion.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for the full text.