Logs

You can use logs to get accurate context about actions in a request between microservices. HCL Universal Orchestrator is integrated with the OpenTelemetry toolkit to generate, collect, and export telemetric data such as logs.

Monitoring logs

Log contains all transactions between microservices when you make a request. A unique TraceID is assigned to each request recorded in the log. You can trace a request in the log to understand the complete flow of the transaction. This includes the microservices involved in the request and the time taken by each microservice to process the request. You can monitor web requests with these logs by sending them to an external application.

You must configure few parameters in values.yaml file to enable tracing. Configure the following parameters under the tracing section of values.yaml file to enable tracing:
  • Enter the value true for the enabled parameter.
  • Configure the otelEndpoint parameter to specify the endpoint of the external application where you want to send all the logs. You must specify such an application that can monitor and observe the log to assess the performance (For example, Jaegar).
  • You also have an optional parameter to filter the logs based on the tracing level. Under global section in values.yaml file, enter the required value for traceLevel parameter. The supported values are FINE, INFO, DEBUG, SEVERE, and ALL.
In a Kubernetes environment, you can navigate to the following path inside each pod to view logs: opt/app/stdlist/. You can find the messages.log and traces.log file at the location. If you have configured the otelEndpoint parameter, all these logs are sent to that application endpoint where you can monitor and troubleshoot the transactions in a request. In the external application, you can use the unique TraceID assigned to each request to find all the associated information with that specific request. You can find the following details in a trace:
  • Name
  • Parent span ID
  • Start and End Timestamps
  • Span Context
  • Attributes
  • Span Events
  • Span Links
  • Span Status