Function Logs

Via an extensible API, OpenFaaS provides access to function logs via the Gateway API and the CLI. This provides a simple and consistent way to access function logs regardless of your orchestration provider.

The official faas-swarm and faas-netes providers stream logs directly from the cluster API, this means that you will get the same logs as when you use docker service logs and kubectl logs. OpenFaaS only wraps wraps the existing container-native log systems, so you can always access function logs via the orchestration CLIs.

The faas-cli logs NAME command will stream the logs for the named function. By default, it will attempt to follow the logs, but you can control the behavior of the stream using these flags

  1. --follow                 continue printing new logs until the end of the request, up to 30s (default true)
  2. --since duration         return logs newer than a relative duration like 5s
  3. --since-time timestamp   include logs since the given timestamp (RFC3339)
  4. --tail int               number of recent log lines file to display. Defaults to -1, unlimited if <=0 (default -1)

Log structure

The logs for a function will look

  1. <RCF8601 Timestamp> <function name> (<container instance>) <msg>

where msg is the container logs, this typically contains stdout and stderr of the contianer.

An example log output for nodeinfo from the function store is

  1. 2019-07-21 07:57:14.437219758 +0000 UTC nodeinfo (nodeinfo-867cc95845-p9882) 2019/07/21 07:57:14 Wrote 92 Bytes - Duration: 0.121959 seconds

The CLI writes logs to stdout, so it can easily be chained with any of your favorite CLI tools: grep, sed, fzf etc.

For example, when you set the write_debug environment variable in the Sentiment Analysis function from the Store, it will print the function output to the logs, we can then search that output using grep. For example,

  1. faas-cli store deploy SentimentAnalysis --env write_debug=true
  2. echo "i like code" | faas-cli invoke sentimentanalysis
  3. echo "i like functions" | faas-cli invoke sentimentanalysis
  4. echo "i like containers" | faas-cli invoke sentimentanalysis
  5. faas-cli logs sentimentanalysis | grep sentence_count
  6. 2019-07-22 12:44:08.202436478 +0000 UTC sentimentanalysis (sentimentanalysis-7887c5d8c5-5rnb5) {"polarity": 0.0, "sentence_count": 1, "subjectivity": 0.0}
  7. 2019-07-22 12:44:10.11422064 +0000 UTC sentimentanalysis (sentimentanalysis-7887c5d8c5-5rnb5) {"polarity": 0.0, "sentence_count": 1, "subjectivity": 0.0}
  8. 2019-07-22 12:44:11.882708263 +0000 UTC sentimentanalysis (sentimentanalysis-7887c5d8c5-5rnb5) {"polarity": 0.0, "sentence_count": 1, "subjectivity": 0.0}

Log Retention and History

Log retention and history will be determined by your cluster configuration and the log provider installed. The default configuration in the official function providers (faas-swarm and faas-netes) stream logs directly from the cluster containers. This means that you will only see logs from running function containers, no long term history. So deleting a function will also remove access to those logs.

Alternative Log Providers

The log system is designed to be extended with alternative providers, this means that logs could instead be supplied by a persistent storage, e.g. Loki or ElasticSearch. See the log providers overview for more details about how providers work and available alternatives.