We have a handful of Ruby (Rails/Sinatra) apps and are looking for an easy means of managing retention, search and analysis of our logs for these applications.
The initial problem was that every time we'd push a new version of our apps the logs would disappear.
We then started streaming our logs to a file via a terminal using:
cf logs AppName
however the logfiles get very big, very fast and quickly become a problem.
We know that the Bluemix Monitoring and Analytics service provides a lot of the function we need. We're looking that over but want to know if there are other recomended/proven options.
Thanks
We found several 3rd party apps that provide the functions we need.
To use any of these we first had to configure third party logging on Bluemix and used the steps below.
Any 3rd party logger that supports the syslog protocol can be used. The initial setup, registration and configuration of the log manegement service, is well covered at Configuring Selected Third-Party Log Management Services.
What will come out of the configuration step is a syslog URL which will be the destination for your logs.
Once the logging service is configured a user-provided service instance needs to be created to stream the logs to the logging service. We did this using:
cf create-user-provided-service <user-provided-service_name> -l <syslog_URL>
Last step is to bind the service instance to our Ruby apps.
cf bind-service AppName <user-provided-service_name>
For the changes to take effcet, we then had to restage our ruby apps:
cf restage AppName
There was a brief delay between when we'd see the logs generated and when they'd show up in the logger service but overall this is working out ok for us so far.