Java Logging Support for Cloud Foundry

Summary

This is a collection of support libraries for Java applications running on Cloud Foundry that serve two main purposes: It provides (a) means to emit structured application log messages and (b) instrument parts of your application stack to collect request metrics.

When we say structured, we actually mean in JSON format. In that sense, it shares ideas with logstash-logback-encoder (and a first internal version was actually based on it), but takes a simpler approach as we want to ensure that these structured messages adhere to standardized formats. With such standardized formats in place, it becomes much easier to ingest, process and search such messages in log analysis stacks like, e.g., ELK.

If you're interested in the specifications of these standardized formats, you may want to have closer look at the fields.yml files in the beats folder.

While logstash-logback-encoder is tied to logback, we've tried to stay implementation neutral and have implemented the core functionality on top of slf4j, but provide implementations for both logback and log4j2 (and we're open to contributions that would support other implementations).

The instrumentation part is currently focusing on providing request filters for Java Servlets and client and server filters for Jersey, but again, we're open to contributions for other APIs and frameworks.

Features and dependencies

As you can see from the structure of this repository, we're not providing one uber JAR that contains everything, but provide each feature separately. We also try to stay away from wiring up too many dependencies by tagging almost all of them as provided. As a consequence, it's your task to get all runtime dependencies resolved in your application POM file.

All in all, you should do the following:

• make up your mind which features you actually need,
• adjust your Maven dependencies accordingly,
• pick your favorite logging implementation, and
• adjust your logging configuration accordingly.

Say, you want to make use of the servlet filter feature, then you need to add the following dependency to your POM with property cf-logging-version referring to the latest version (currently 2.0.8):

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.sap.hcp.cf.logging</groupId>
  <artifactId>cf-java-logging-support-servlet</artifactId>
  <version>${cf-logging-version}</version>
</dependency>

This feature only depends on the servlet API which you have included in your POM anyhow.

Implementation variants and logging configurations

The core feature (on which all other features rely) is just using the org.slf4j API, but to actually get logs written, you need to pick an implementation feature. As stated above, we have two implementations

• cf-java-logging-support-logback based on logback, and
• cf-java-logging-support-log4j2 based on log4j2.

Again, we don't include dependencies to those implementation backends ourselves, so you need to provide the corresponding dependencies in your POM file:

Using logback:

<dependency>
	<groupId>com.sap.hcp.cf.logging</groupId>
  	<artifactId>cf-java-logging-support-logback</artifactId>
  	<version>${cf-logging-version}</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
  	<groupId>ch.qos.logback</groupId>
   	<artifactId>logback-classic</artifactId>
   	<version>1.1.3</version>
 </dependency>

Using log4j2:

<dependency>
	<groupId>com.sap.hcp.cf.logging</groupId>
  	<artifactId>cf-java-logging-support-log4j2</artifactId>
  	<version>${cf-logging-version}</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.logging.log4j</groupId>
	<artifactId>log4j-slf4j-impl</artifactId>
<version>2.4.1</version>
</dependency>
	<dependency>
	<groupId>org.apache.logging.log4j</groupId>
	<artifactId>log4j-core</artifactId>
	<version>2.4.1</version>
</dependency>

As they have slightly different ways to do configuration, you again need to do that yourself. But we hope that we've found an easy way to accomplish that. The one thing you have to do is pick our encoder in your logback.xml if you're using logback or our layout in your log4j2.xmlif you're using log4j2.

Here are sort of the minimal configurations you'd need:

logback.xml:

<configuration debug="false" scan="false">
	<appender name="STDOUT-JSON" class="ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender">
       <encoder class="com.sap.hcp.cf.logback.encoder.JsonEncoder"/>
    </appender>
    <!-- for local development, you may want to switch to a more human-readable layout -->
    <appender name="STDOUT" class="ch.qos.logback.core.ConsoleAppender">
        <encoder>
            <pattern>%date %-5level [%thread] - [%logger] [%mdc] - %msg%n</pattern>
        </encoder>
    </appender>
    <root level="${LOG_ROOT_LEVEL:-WARN}">
       <!-- Use 'STDOUT' instead for human-readable output -->
       <appender-ref ref="STDOUT-JSON" />
    </root>
  	<!-- request metrics are reported using INFO level, so make sure the instrumentation loggers are set to that level -->
    <logger name="com.sap.hcp.cf" level="INFO" />
</configuration>

log4j2.xml:

<Configuration
   status="warn" strict="true"
   packages="com.sap.hcp.cf.log4j2.converter,com.sap.hcp.cf.log4j2.layout">
	<Appenders>
        <Console name="STDOUT-JSON" target="SYSTEM_OUT" follow="true">
            <JsonPatternLayout charset="utf-8"/>
        </Console>
        <Console name="STDOUT" target="SYSTEM_OUT" follow="true">
            <PatternLayout pattern="%d{HH:mm:ss.SSS} [%t] %-5level %logger{36} [%mdc] - %msg%n"/>
        </Console>
	</Appenders>
  <Loggers>
     <Root level="${LOG_ROOT_LEVEL:-WARN}">
        <!-- Use 'STDOUT' instead for human-readable output -->
        <AppenderRef ref="STDOUT-JSON" />
     </Root>
  	 <!-- request metrics are reported using INFO level, so make sure the instrumentation loggers are set to that level -->
     <Logger name="com.sap.hcp.cf" level="INFO"/>
  </Loggers>
</Configuration>

Sample Application

In order to illustrate how the different features are used, this repository includes a simple application in the ./sample folder.

Documentation

More info on the actual implementation can be found in the Wiki.