I don’t have access to our production logs. That stinks. We’ve been discussing internally on how to gain access, so with a little searching I found this wonderful gem called logstasher. It provides a way for our rails app to convert its logs to JSON to allow logstash to grab and send to elasticsearch then the Cou de Gras! —Kibana. Kibana provides a visual interface to view and query against elasticsearch.
Installation on my local was more involved since the installation instructions were not well documented. I had to figure it out between installing the gem and finally installing the above apps. The gem says that kibana comes with logstash but I couldn’t get that to work.
For MacOS–El Capitan:
$brew install elasticsearch
$brew install logstash
$brew install kibana
$vi ~/path/to/kibana.yml
uncomment the default line for elasticsearch url
In your rails app, add gem ‘logstasher’ to the Gemfile and bundle. Add the following to your development.rb file:
#Enable the logstasher logs for the current env
config.logstasher.enabled = true
Create a name_that_makes_sense.conf file in directory where you will maintain your logstasher configurations(you could add it to your app root) and add these lines:
input {
file {
type => “rails”
path => “/Users/username/app_name/log/development.log”
codec => json {
charset => “UTF-8”
}
}
}
output {
# Print each event to stdout.
stdout {
codec => rubydebug
}
elasticsearch {
hosts => [“localhost:9200”]
}
}
After you save that, start all the services if you havent already(you will need to restart kibana if you setup the yml file after you already started it):
$elasticsearch & #you can browse to localhost:9200 and see if you get a response
$kibana & #kibana has its on webserver with the latest release
$logstash -f path/to/name_that_makes_sense.conf
$rails s
Then open a browser at http://localhost:5601
The kibana application will not let you configure any indices until your logstash setup is sending data to elasticsearch, so the app needs to serve some request before it has data to search and query. It will not initialize and convert an existing log.
Have Fun!
Jeff Scholen 