index.md

layout	title	tags
article	logging from NodeJS	node nodejs bucker

• Goal: Get NodeJS apps to output logstash compatible log files.
• Audience: Folks who have NodeJS apps and want an easy path to logstash

Introduction

Logging from NodeJS is normally done by sending console output to a file. Most of the time this is done via upstart or runit to brute-force capture the console stream.

Some applications use logging modules but the vast majority of those wrap the console output to a file with minimal fanfare.

We use at And Yet use bucker for that - it's a module that was created by us for internal use and we have open-sourced it. This gives you all the normal things you expect from a logging tool: levels, exception handling, middleware integration - and then it also adds multiple transport options.

Bucker just gained the ability to output directly to logstash via either UDP or Redis PubSub and it outputs json_event data for easy input to logstash.

Logging to UDP

{
  logstash: {
    udp: true,         // or send directly over UDP
    host: '127.0.0.1', // defaults to localhost
    port: 9999, // defaults to 6379 for redis, 9999 for udp
  }
}

Logging to Redis

{
  logstash: {
    redis: true,       // send as redis pubsub messages
    host: '127.0.0.1', // defaults to localhost
    port: 6379,        // defaults to 6379 for redis
    key: 'bucker_logs' // defaults to 'bucker', this is only used for the redis transport
  }
}

NOTE: you can only send to Redis OR UDP, not both

Logstash side

udp {
        host => "127.0.0.1"
        type => "udp"
        format => "json_event"
}
redis {
        host => "127.0.0.1"
        type => "redis-channel"
        data_type => "channel"
        key => "bucker"  // bucker will only ever send to this key
}