Metrics

When logging data it is also useful to gather metrics that can be used in dashboards to track:

Duration Metrics

Log how long it took to call an external interface and send that duration as a metric to all metric subscribers.

To set any duration based metric, add :metric option to any measure_ logging call, along with a name for the metric:

logger.measure_info("Called supplier", metric: "supplier/add_user") do
  # Code to call external service ...
end

Using keyword arguments, add the :metric option to any level based logging call, along with a name for the metric as well as the required :duration in ms.

logger.info(message: "Called supplier", metric: "supplier/add_user", duration: 100.23)

Counting Metrics

Counting metrics can be incremented or decremented as part of a logging call. Using keyword arguments, add the :metric option.

logger.info(message: "Called supplier", metric: "supplier/called_user")

In the above example the metric supplier/called_user is incremented by 1.

To decrement a metric:

logger.info(message: "Called supplier", metric: "supplier/called_user", metric_amount: -1)

To increment total counters, such as the total dollar amount of purchases by department:

logger.info(message: "Purchase complete", metric: "departments/clothing", metric_amount: 189.42)

Note: Statsd total counters only supports integers, floats are rounded to the nearest integer.

Metric Subscribers

Subscribers will receive every log message that has a :metric option specified. The subscribers are called asynchronously from the Appender Thread so as not to impact the original thread that logged the message.

Statsd

Send metrics to Statsd via UDP so it can roll them up and send them to graphite or mongodb.

subscriber = SemanticLogger::Metric::Statsd.new(url: "udp://localhost:8125")
SemanticLogger.on_log(subscriber)

New Relic

To forward metrics to New Relic so that they can be displayed using custom dashboards:

subscriber = SemanticLogger::Metric::NewRelic.new
SemanticLogger.on_log(subscriber)

Elasticsearch & Splunk

Metrics are sent as part of the log message to Elasticsearch and Splunk so that they can be displayed using their custom dashboards.

Custom Subscriber

For example, if running a rails application, create a file called config/initializers/semantic_logger_metrics.rb

SemanticLogger.on_log do |log_struct|
  puts "Metric: #{log_struct.metric} with duration: #{log_struct.duration}ms"
end

For the format of the Log Struct, see Log Struct

Notes

Performance

Log level

Next: Signals ==>