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ejain | 11 years ago

Does the syslog appender handle large, multi-line log messages (i.e. messages containing stack traces)?

I recall having some trouble with that when using syslog with Loggly, before switching over to the json appender.

discuss

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troydavis|11 years ago

Short answer: it depends.

Long answer: logback and both appenders can accept pattern formats to adjust how they're formatted. How useful the end result is depends a lot on the receiver, though, and more than that, there's no one implementation that's great for everyone -- that is, there's no right way to "handle large, multi-line log messages," only attempts at making them more useful.

An easy example is searching. Some people want to see the entire message, others want only the matching portion of a stack trace, others want some combination, and others - probably most people - just want something that's useful, however the actual UX works.

In Papertrail's case, our sender-specific context links (think grep -A/-B/-C) were designed for navigating multiline output from a single sender: https://papertrailapp.com/tour/viewer/context. It's basically pivoting from a single entry in a stack trace to the entire stack trace.