Driving Your VMR Data Home with Enhanced Docker Container Logging

Editor’s note: We’ve renamed our product suite. The VMR is now referred to as Solace PubSub+. See our products page for more information.

***

In the 8.7.0 release of the Solace VMR, we added several improvements to the VMR Docker containers’ standard logging functionality. They provide the ability to customize the content, format, and delivery method of event data from the SolOS application to better integrate with the native log aggregation facilities in your PaaS.

Some examples of this data include:

• The network health of individual client connections, including slow consumer detection.
• Alerts on queuing thresholds.
• Alerts when data rates exceed expectations.
• Alerts when other threshold and boundary conditions are breached and recovered.

Support for Docker Native Logging Facilities

You can configure the VMR Docker container to direct logging facilities to stdout using configuration keys.  This allows the output from the container to be tied into the back-ends that the Docker logging drivers enable.

Solace VMR Docker containers now support the following logging drivers:

• json-file
• journald
• syslog
• fluentd
• splunk
• gelf
• awslogs

Normalized Logging Output

We’ve normalized the logging formats to make them more easily consumed by various logging applications. In addition, you can now modify the output format, choosing between graylog, rfc5424, raw, or the legacy format to match the application you plan to use for centralized log management.

These improvements make it easy to integrate your VMR Docker container output into a log aggregator backend for additional processing.

For example, if you direct the logging facilities to stdout, you can specify the graylog output format, and with the gelf Docker driver, forward the logs to a graylog aggregator for advanced storage, analysis, and reporting.

Or, if you want the output in a standard syslog format and you want to direct the logs to a syslog receiver, you can do that too.

For more information on the topics discussed here, check out the following links:

Click here to learn how to configure VMR Docker container logging

Click here to learn how to use configuration keys to configure VMR Docker containers

Click here to learn more about Solace router logging

Paul Kondrat

Paul Kondrat is a member of the Solace Product Management team. His areas of expertise include platforms, operating systems and the appliance hardware. He has been with Solace since 2005 and also works in the architecture team on the hardware platform. Prior to joining Solace, Paul worked at Newbridge Networks (later Alcatel Canada) as a hardware designer on various IP routing and switching products.

See all posts written by Paul Kondrat