Logging everything in real-time

Talk from Berlin PHP Usergroup

Transcript

1. Logging Everything in Real-Time @BastianHofmann As the title says in the next hour we are going to talk about a very important aspect of any web application that is often overlooked in the beginning:
2. Logging Logging: so that you actually now, what's happening in your application if you have to track down an error
3. Many roads Of course as with many things there are many roads to accomplish that and many tools available, that help you with it. i'll not going to show you all of them, but just what we ended up using at ResearchGate. They work great for us, but depending on your use cases other tools may be more suited to your needs. The important thing to get out of this talk: take care of it
4. A few words about me before that ...
5. i work at researchgate, the social network for scientists and researchers
6. over 3 million users
7. here some impressions of the page
9. have this, and also work on some cool stuff
11. Questions? Ask by the way, if you have any questions throughout this talk, if you don't understand something, just raise your hand and ask. probably my fault anyways since i spoke to quickly or my accent was too bad
12. http://speakerdeck.com/u/bastianhofmann
13. Logging So: Logging
14. For when something goes wrong
15. server error log access log debug logs slow query log ... Let's start with a simple setup: we have one server with an apache and some database on it. Of course all of these services are writing logs somewhere
16. $ ssh my_simple_server getting at these is very simple, just ssh into the server
17. $ tail -f error.log $ cat error.log | grep Exception and use your favorite unix command line tools to view the logs
18. Error Logs Let's look at the application related logs a bit more closely, for example the ... as it says, Apache and PHP log all errors that happen in your application there
19. ErrorLog /var/logs/apache/error.log The location is specified in your Apache configuration somewhere like this
20. php.ini •error_reporting •display_errors •display_startup_errors •log_errors •error_log And there are some ini settings in PHP for configuring how errors should be handled, just read up on them in the documentation
21. callable set_exception_handler( callable $exception_handler ); Since you probably don't want to display an exception to the user (or a blank page) but a nice error page, you should set a custom exception handler in your application
22. callable set_error_handler( callable $error_handler [, int $error_types = E_ALL | E_STRICT ] ); and while you are at it, also set a custom error_handler, hey it's PHP
23. bool error_log ( string $message [, int $message_type = 0 [, string $destination [, string $extra_headers ]]] ) You can then log to the apache error log with the error_log function
24. and the user can get then such a nice error page, looking at this screenshot: first you may notice is the http response code displayed there
25. HTTP Response Codes http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616- sec6.html Please read up on it and choose correct ones for your application. helps you greatly with filtering the important stuff from the unimportant later on: a 503 may be much more serious then a 404
26. on the screenshot here you also see some additional codes and ids displayed that help to identify the error in your system later on
27. Log additional info of course you should not only display this information but also write it to your log files, you can easily do this in your custom error handler, and if you need to find the error that resulted in this error page you can just grep for the error code
28. Not only error codes
29. Request Information
30. But what about fatal errors A bit earlier I said, you should actually write your own error handler to catch them show an error page and add custom information to the error logs, but what about fatal error, the php script is aborted then
31. Use error_get_last() in a Shutdown Handler http://php.net/manual/en/function.error- get-last.php
32. Access Logs Another important log is the access log, which logs each incoming request
33. 192.168.56.1 - - [09/Jul/2012:19:18:19 +0200] "GET /rg_trunk/webroot/c/af10c/ images/template/rg_logo_default.png HTTP/ 1.1" 200 882 "http://devm/rg_trunk/webroot/ directory/publications/" this is what it usually looks like
34. LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" custom CustomLog /var/logs/apache/access.log custom http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/ mod_log_config.html#logformat and you configure it in apache like this, there is already lots of information from the request you can put in there, like url, response code, request time etc
35. http://de.php.net/apache_note string apache_note ( string $note_name [, string $note_value = "" ] ) but with the apache_note function you can add additional information from your application. by the way this is of course also possible with nginx, there you just set some response headers in php, in nginx you can then access these upstream headers, log them, and then filter them out so the clients don't get them
36. LogFormat "...\"%{referer}i\" \"%{user- agent}i\" %{session_id}n %{account_id}n..." custom but back to apache: these notes then can be referenced in your log format like this
37. Debug Logs next log type that your application can write are plain debug logs that are not related to errors
38. https://github.com/Seldaek/monolog/ a good library recommendation for doing this instead of writing to a file manually is monolog
39. <?php use Monolog\Logger; use Monolog\Handler\StreamHandler; // create a log channel $log = new Logger('name'); $log->pushHandler( new StreamHandler( 'path/to/your.log', Logger::WARNING ) ); // add records to the log $log->addWarning('Foo'); $log->addError('Bar');
40. Handlers •Stream •Mail •FirePHP •ChromePHP •Socket •Roating File •MongoDB •Syslog •Gelf •Null •Test •FingersCrossed nice thing is: it supports multiple handlers out of the box, to log wherever you need it, especially useful: the fingers crossed handler: you just put your logs in this handler but it does not log them directly to a file, only when a certain condition was met, like a threshold all already written logs and all further logs are written to a file
41. Log in a structured way one thing that can help you greatly with managing huge amount of logs with lot's of different additional information in it is logging in a structured way (not only for debug but also for error logs)
42. JSON http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt in my opinion a good format is json, since it is still human readable
43. <?php use Monolog\Logger; use Monolog\Handler\StreamHandler; use Monolog\Formatter\JsonFormatter; $log = new Logger('name'); $handler = new StreamHandler( 'path/to/your.log', Logger::WARNING ); $handler->setFormatter(new JsonFormatter()); $log->pushHandler($handler); in monolog you can just set a formatter for this
44. Logs from other services but of course your application probably is a bit more complex, soa anyone? so you have also other services somewhere logging something
45. web server http service http service http service http service user request log log log log log the setup may look like this, a request comes to a webserver and your php application on there calls other services. each of them have their own logs. for example the http service there. now if an error happens in the http service we are probably going to display an error as well in our php app. but how can we identify then which exception on the http service lead to the displayed error on the web server?
46. Correlation / Tracing ID a nice way of doing this in a generlized, non-custom way is by using a common correlation or tracing id
47. web server http service http service http service http service create unique trace_id for request user request trace_id trace_id trace_id trace_id log log log log log so when the user request first hits your system you generate a unique trace_id for this request and you then pass this to all underlying services through an http header.
48. X-Trace-Id: bbr8ehb984tbab894
49. web server http service http service http service http service create unique trace_id for request user request trace_id trace_id trace_id trace_id log log log log log everyone then puts these tracing id in every logs they write. so if you have a tracing id you can easily find all logs for this request by just greping for the trace_id
50. but... usually your application does not look like this
51. but more like this: you have multiple servers lying around
52. which means ssh-ing into all of these servers (dsh...) and then grepping for information over multiple logs (access log, error log, debug logs, ...) can become quite tedious and time consuming
53. Aggregate the logs in a central place so to make it easier: work on a central log management and ...
54. Make them easily full-text searchable also ...
55. Make them aggregate-able and make different kind of logs aggregateable
56. Always Log to file but whatever you do and whatever we are going to talk about...
57. Seriously...
58. Always Log to file because this is your backup when your central log management solution will fail (network errors, etc). and i'll guarantee you, it will fail sometime, probably at the worst moment
59. Directly to a database first naive approach to central log management is to log directly from you application to a database (you saw the mongoDbHandler from Monolog)
60. webserver webserver webserver DB setup would look like this: everything in one place, easily searchable, great, finished
61. Disadvantages not quite, it has some disadvantages
62. Database is down? what happens if
63. Database is slow?
64. Database is full?
65. How to integrate access logs?
66. Influences application performance because of all the database queries you are doing, and chances are if there are problems on your platform and multiple errors are occurring, directly writing to a database will make your problems worse
67. Frontend? also there is still no frontend to easily search and monitor exceptions, of course there are sql clients, phpmyadmin, rockmongo etc, but they are multi purpose tools and not really made for displaying and filtering logs
68. Better solutions? are there ...
69. graylog2 http://graylog2.org/ on tool that I quite like for this is called graylog2
70. Full text search it comes out of the box with a very nice interface to do...
71. Structured Messages in ...
72. Metrics & Alarms and offers metrics, alarms on your logs
73. that's what the interface looks like, you'll see this in action in a minute
74. https://github.com/bashofmann/ vm_graylog2_amqp_logstash_apache
75. Graylog2 UDP GELF Messages elasticsearch webserver webserver webserver the easiest approach is to just send the messages in a special format (gelf, supported by a monolog handler) with a upd request from your app servers to graylog which stores them in elasticsearch. udp is quite nice since it is fire and forget, so it does not influence our application too much (if you reuse connections and don't create a new one for each log)
76. { "version": "1.0", "host": "www1", "short_message": "Short message", "full_message": "Backtrace here\n \nmore stuff", "timestamp": 1291899928.412, "level": 1, "facility": "payment-backend", "file": "/var/www/somefile.rb", "line": 356, "_user_id": 42, "_something_else": "foo" } a typical graylog gelf message looks like this, some default fields, and user specific fields prepended with an underscore
77. Disadvantages but ...
78. Graylog/ elasticsearch is down? still if graylog/es is down you are using logs
79. Graylog/ elasticsearch is full?
80. Packet loss udp has the disadvantage that because of network errors your logs possibly don't arrive
81. Graylog2 elasticsearch webserver webserver webserver AMQP GELF GELF GELF GELF better approach, put a queue in between, also good for load balancing
82. Don't influence your application by logging but still if you push something in a queue you are still influencing your production system unnecessarily
83. Always Log to file and remember you should log to file anyways
84. logstash http://logstash.net/ enter the next tool we are using, logstash is a very powerful tool to handle log processing
85. input filter output basic workflow is that you have some input where logstash gets log messages in, on this input you can execute multiple filters that modify the message and then you can output the filtered message somewhere
86. Very rich plugin system to do this it offers a very large and rich plugin system for all kinds of inputs, filters and outputs, and you can also write your own
87. Graylog2 elasticsearch webserver webserver webserver AMQP log log log logstash logstash logstash so our setup would look like this, logstash instances on each app server take the local log files, parse and filter them and send them to the queue
88. input { file { type => "error" path => [ "/var/logs/php/*.log" ] add_field => [ "severity", "error" ] } file { type => "access" path => [ "/var/logs/apache/*_access.log" ] add_field => [ "severity", "info" ] } } input configuration
89. filter{ grok { match => ["@source", "\/%{USERNAME:facility}\.log$"] } grok { type => "access" pattern => "^%{IP:OriginalIp} \s[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+\s[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+\s\[.*? \]\s\"%{DATA:Request}..." } } filter configuration
90. output { amqp { host => "amqp.host" exchange_type => "fanout" name => "logs" } } output configuration
91. http://twitter.com/BastianHofmann http://profiles.google.com/bashofmann http://lanyrd.com/people/BastianHofmann http://speakerdeck.com/u/bastianhofmann https://github.com/bashofmann https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bastian_Hofmann/ mail@bastianhofmann.de thanks, you can contact me on any of these platforms or via mail.