[Openstack-operators] [log] LOG.exception should contain an exception message or not?

Joshua Harlow harlowja at fastmail.com
Tue Jan 5 22:40:34 UTC 2016


Perhaps the recommendation should be to not use line-oriented tools (and 
formatters) for logs? At least at yahoo we use the json formatter 
provided by oslo.log and then use the functionality of splunk to handle 
json records (which afaik is built-in). Likely other tools can also 
handle json records pretty easily/hopefully built-in to.

Then u get nice structured data and other goodies.

-Josh

Akihiro Motoki wrote:
> Hi,
>
> # cross-posting to -dev and -operators ML
>
> In the current most OpenStack implementation,
> when we use LOG.exception, we don't pass an exception message to LOG.exception:
>
>    LOG.exception(_LE("Error while processing VIF ports"))
>
> IIUC it is because the exception message will be logged at the end of
> a corresponding stacktrace.
>
> We will get a line like (Full log: http://paste.openstack.org/show/483018/):
>
>    ERROR ... Error while processing VIF ports
>
> [Problem]
>
> Many logging tools are still line-oriented (though logstash or fluentd
> can handle multiple lines).
> An ERROR line only contains a summary message without the actual failure reason.
> This makes difficult for line-oriented logging tools to classify error logs.
>
> [Proposal]
>
> My proposal is to pass an exception message to LOG.exception like:
>
>    except<some exception>  as exc:
>       LOG.exception(_LE("Error while processing VIF ports: %s"), exc)
>
> This alllows line-oriented logging tools to classify error logs more easily.
>
>
> Thought?
>
> Thanks,
> Akihiro
>
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