Manage InfluxDB logs

Learn how to configure, manage, and process your InfluxDB logs:

• Configure your InfluxDB log location
• Configure your log level
• Enable the Flux query log
• Use external tools to manage and process logs
• Log formats

Configure your InfluxDB log location

By default, InfluxDB outputs all logs to stdout. To view InfluxDB logs, view the output of the influxd process.

• Write logs to a file
• Logs when running InfluxDB as a service

Write logs to a file

To write InfluxDB logs to a file, redirect stdout to a file when starting the InfluxDB service (influxd).

influxd 1> /path/to/influxdb.log

When logging to a file, InfluxDB uses the logfmt format.

Logs when running InfluxDB as a service

If you use a service manager to run InfluxDB, the service manager determines the location of logs.

systemd sysvinit

Most Linux systems direct logs to the systemd journal. To access these logs, use the following command:

sudo journalctl -u influxdb.service

For more information, see the journald.conf documentation.

When InfluxDB is run as a service, stdout is discarded by default (sent to /dev/null). To write logs to a file:

1. Open the InfluxDB startup script (/etc/default/influxdb) in a text editor.

2. Set the STDOUT environment variable to the path where you want to store the InfluxDB logs. For example:

   STDOUT=/var/log/influxdb/influxd.log

3. Save the changes to the startup script.

4. Restart the InfluxDB service to apply the changes.

   service influxdb restart

Configure your log level

Use the log-level InfluxDB configuration option to specify the log levels the InfluxDB service outputs. InfluxDB supports the following log levels:

• debug: Output logs with debug, info, and error log levels.
• info: (Default) Output logs with info and error log levels.
• error: Output logs with the error log level only.

influxd flag Environment variable InfluxDB configuration file

influxd --log-level=info

export INFLUXD_LOG_LEVEL=info

YAML TOML JSON

log-level: info

log-level = "info"

{
  "log-level": "info"
}

For information about configuring InfluxDB, see InfluxDB configuration options.

Enable the Flux query log

Use the flux-log-enabled configuration option to enable Flux query logging. InfluxDB outputs Flux query logs to stdout with all other InfluxDB logs.

influxd flag Environment variable InfluxDB configuration file

influxd --flux-log-enabled

export INFLUXD_FLUX_LOG_ENABLED=true

YAML TOML JSON

flux-log-enabled: true

flux-log-enabled = true

{
  "flux-log-enabled": true
}

For information about configuring InfluxDB, see InfluxDB configuration options.

Use external tools to manage and process logs

Use the following popular tools to manage and process InfluxDB logs:

logrotate

logrotate simplifies the administration of log files and provides automatic rotation compression, removal and mailing of log files. Logrotate can be set to handle a log file hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or when the log file gets to a certain size.

hutils

hutils is a collection of command line utilities for working with logs with logfmt encoding, including:

• lcut: Extracts values from a logfmt trace based on a specified field name.
• lfmt: Reformats and highlights key sections of logfmt lines.
• ltap: Accesses messages from log providers in a consistent way to allow easy parsing by other utilities that operate on logfmt traces.
• lviz: Visualizes logfmt output by building a tree out of a dataset combining common sets of key-value pairs into shared parent nodes.

lnav (Log File Navigator)

lnav (Log File Navigator) is an advanced log file viewer useful for watching and analyzing log files from a terminal. The lnav viewer provides a single log view, automatic log format detection, filtering, timeline view, pretty-print view, and querying logs using SQL.

Log formats

InfluxDB outputs logs in one of two formats depending on the location of where logs are output.

• Console/TTY
• logfmt

Console/TTY

When logging to a terminal or other TTY devices, InfluxDB uses a console-friendly format.

Example console/TTY format

2022-09-29T21:58:29.936355Z    info    Welcome to InfluxDB    {"log_id": "0dEoz3C0000", "version": "dev", "commit": "663d43d210", "build_date": "2022-09-29T21:58:29Z", "log_level": "info"}
2022-09-29T21:58:29.977671Z    info    Resources opened    {"log_id": "0dEoz3C0000", "service": "bolt", "path": "/Users/exampleuser/.influxdbv2/influxd.bolt"}
2022-09-29T21:58:29.977891Z    info    Resources opened    {"log_id": "0dEoz3C0000", "service": "sqlite", "path": "/Users/exampleuser/.influxdbv2/influxd.sqlite"}
2022-09-29T21:58:30.059709Z    info    Checking InfluxDB metadata for prior version.    {"log_id": "0dEoz3C0000", "bolt_path": "/Users/exampleuser/.influxdbv2/influxd.bolt"}

logfmt

When logging to a file, InfluxDB uses logfmt, a machine-readable structured log format that provides simpler integrations with external tools like Splunk, Papertrail, Elasticsearch, and other third party tools.

Example logfmt format

ts=2022-09-29T16:54:16.021427Z lvl=info msg="Welcome to InfluxDB" log_id=0dEYZvqG000 version=dev commit=663d43d210 build_date=2022-09-29T16:54:15Z log_level=info
ts=2022-09-29T16:54:16.062239Z lvl=info msg="Resources opened" log_id=0dEYZvqG000 service=bolt path=/Users/exampleuser/.influxdbv2/influxd.bolt
ts=2022-09-29T16:54:16.062457Z lvl=info msg="Resources opened" log_id=0dEYZvqG000 service=sqlite path=/Users/exampleuser/.influxdbv2/influxd.sqlite
ts=2022-09-29T16:54:16.144430Z lvl=info msg="Checking InfluxDB metadata for prior version." log_id=0dEYZvqG000 bolt_path=/Users/exampleuser/.influxdbv2/influxd.bolt