Application Logs
Warning
This content is part of the legacy version of Waypoint that is no longer actively maintained. For additional information on the new vision of Waypoint, check out this blog post and the HCP Waypoint documentation.
Waypoint app logs are aggregated and available to view via the CLI and UI.
Waypoint logs provide a real-time snapshot of logs with minimal retention. The point of Waypoint logs are to debug emergent application behavior rather than historical behavior. Waypoint log aggregation is not meant to be a replacement for a full logging solution such as Datadog. For most deployments, Waypoint will retain days of logs per application.
This functionality requires the Waypoint entrypoint.
Log History Limits
Logs are currently limited to 16,000 lines per application instance. When the limit is reached, logs will begin overwriting the oldest previous data.
Assuming the average length of a line is 100 ASCII characters, this is an overhead of about 1.6 MB per application instance when the log buffer is full. The Waypoint server stores all logs in-memory so this can be used to predict memory requirements.
This is not currently configurable. In a future version of Waypoint we will make this configurable.
Writing to the Log
Any output written to standard out (stdout) or standard error (stderr)
is captured as logs.
If you're seeing a delay in log output, you may need to disable output buffering. Output buffering is sometimes enabled by default for certain languages and environments. Please check with your language documentation.
This functionality requires the Waypoint entrypoint.
Viewing Logs with the CLI
To view logs with the CLI, use the waypoint logs CLI. This will
stream all logs for all deployments of a single application in a project.
If you deploy a new version of the application, the logs will appear without
restarting the CLI command: