Tools and Techniques to Logging Microservices

The microservices architectural style is the approach of developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating using simple mechanisms, often HTTP resource APIs.

These services are based on business functions and can be provided independently from fully automated delivery machines.

Why do we need Logging in Microservices?

Multiple services may be running and communicating with one another in an application based on microservices. When one or more services fail, things get complicated, and you need to know which one failed and why. It’s also essential that you’re able to comprehend the whole request flow, which services were invoked, how many times, and in what order.

You should have meaningful logs available and a unique Id to correlate requests to answer these questions. You should have a proper way to track errors that might span several microservices.

Logging into a monolith is as easy as publishing data to a single log file and retrieving it later. If you have a microservices-based application with logging capabilities, you should be able to overcome some unique challenges.

Below are the points that you need to consider while logging into Microservices:

1. Your Logs Should Provide Sufficient Information

 The information you capture in your logs should, at a minimum, comprise the following data:

• Name of the Service
• Name of the logged-in User
• IP Address
• Correlation Id
• Time at which the message arrived
• Time Taken
• Name of the method
• Call Stack
• HTTP Code

2. Use a Correlation ID.

3. Error Handling: You should also have an automated alerting system that can analyze logs and send notifications when one or more of your application’s services have problems.

4. Your Logs Should be Queryable: Your logging technology should support querying the logs, i.e., your logs should be searchable. Using the correlation Id, you should be able to get the complete request flow.

5. Use a Centralized Log Storage.

6. Structure your Logs Appropriately.

7. Use Logging Levels.

Some of the Best Monitoring Tools:

• SolarWinds Papertrail
• SumoLogic
• Log fusion
• Splunk
• Log Stash
• Data Dog
• site 24*7
• Syslog-ng
• sentry
• Prometheus