| RFC | Title | Author | Status | Type | Tracking |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
96 |
Improved Log Levels |
Thom May <[email protected]> |
Final |
Standards Track |
Presently, the only way to debug a failing chef run is to enable debug logging, which is intended more for the maintainers of Chef than for a systems engineer. We would like to move to a structured metadata model that allows us to slice and dice log messages.
As a Chef maintainer,
I want to know exactly what chef is doing,
so that I can maintain and develop chef.
As a cookbook author,
I want to ensure that my cookbook is interacting with the system as
I expect,
so that I can write cookbooks efficiently.
As a systems engineer,
I want to see the output of running commands,
so that I can debug chef failures.
We propose to move the chef client, and related libraries, to a structured logging format. This would allow us to tag individual log messages with extended metadata, such as the resource/subsystem, the cookbook we're running in, the log level and so on.
We would then update the logging commands to allow the user to specify a set of tags that they're interested in, allowing a user to only get log output from the resources associated with a single cookbook.
Any libraries that Chef includes (such as Ohai, mixlib-authentication and so on) would need to be updated to use structured logging.
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