[wildfly-dev] Reading Logs from Web Console

[James R. Perkins]

I had posted this to another list, but this is a more appropriate place 
for it. I think there needs to be a general discussion around this as 
it's been mentioned, at least to me, a few times here and there and I 
know Heiko raised the issue some time a go now.

The original JIRA, WFLY-280[1], is to display the last 10 error messages 
only. To be honest I wouldn't find that very useful. To me if I'm 
looking for logs I want to see all logs, but that's not always so easy. 
Like the syslog-handler which doesn't log to a file so there is no way 
to read those messages back.

The current plan for the last 10 error messages is we store messages in 
a queue that can be accessed via an operation. This works fine until the 
error message you're interested in is 11 or you want to see warning 
messages.

Another option I had come up with is reading back the contents of the 
file, for example the server.log. This could be problematic too in that 
there is no way to filter information like only see error messages or 
only see warning messages. To solve this I have considered creating a 
JSON formatter so the results could be queried, but I don't think it 
should be a default which would mean it's not reliable for the console 
to assume it's getting back JSON.

I've also thought about, haven't tested this and it may not work at all, 
creating a handler that uses websockets to send messages. I'm not sure 
how well this would work and it's possible it may not even work for 
bootstrap logging.

With regards to audit logging, we're probably going to have to do 
something totally different from what we'll do in the logging subsystem 
since it doesn't use standard logging.

I guess the bottom line is what does the console want to see? Do you 
want to see all raw text log messages? Do you want all messages but in a 
format like JSON that you can query/filter? Do you really want only the 
last 10 error messages only? All or none of these might be possible, but 
I really need to understand the needs before I can explore more in depth 
what the best option would be.

[1]: https://issues.jboss.org/browse/WFLY-280

-- 
James R. Perkins
Red Hat JBoss Middleware

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