About
Tjahzi is a Java client for Grafana Loki.
Latest releases:
Design principles
Logging should be lightweight and not interfere with main business tasks of threads that happen to log a message. Asking the logging subsystem to log a message should be as CPU efficient as possible. That's a truism. Apart from computation itself there are many other causes of jitter (varying speed of code execution). Thread can be slowed down by excessive allocations, by initialization code running in constructors of unnecessarily allocated objects, by garbage collector activity that is triggered by it. There can by configuration refresh checks on logging path, inter thread signaling etc.
To avoid these effects we strive to adhere to the following principles (and document any violations):
- Lock free and wait free API
- Allocation free in steady state
You can compare this with design principles of Aeron which are close to our hearts.
Architecture
+-------------+ Log
| Application |----------------+
| Thread 1 | |
+-------------+ |
|
. \|/
+----+---------------+ +---------+
. Log | | | I/O |
--------------->+ Log buffer +-->--->--+ thread |
. | | | (Netty) |
+----------+---------+ +---------+
. /|\
|
+-------------+ Log |
| Application |----------------------+
| Thread N |
+-------------+
Log4j2 Appender
On top of a Core component with rather simplistic API we intend to build several layers that make it truly useful. Log4j2
appender seemed like a good first.
Example Log4j2 configuration
This example sets up a root logger with a Loki appender.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration status="OFF" shutdownHook="disable" packages="pl.tkowalcz.tjahzi.log4j2">
<Loggers>
<Root level="INFO">
<AppenderRef ref="Loki"/>
</Root>
</Loggers>
<appenders>
<Loki name="Loki">
<host>${sys:loki.host}</host>
<port>${sys:loki.port}</port>
<ThresholdFilter level="ALL"/>
<PatternLayout>
<Pattern>%X{tid} [%t] %d{MM-dd HH:mm:ss.SSS} %5p %c{1} - %m%n%exception{full}</Pattern>
</PatternLayout>
<Header name="X-Scope-OrgID" value="Circus"/>
<Label name="server" value="127.0.0.1"/>
</Loki>
</appenders>
</configuration>
Lookups / variable substitution
Contents of the properties are automatically interpolated by Log4j2 (see here). All environment, system etc. variable references will be replaced by their values during initialization of the appender. Alternatively this process could have been executed for every log message. The latter approach was deemed too expensive. If you need a mechanism to replace a variable after logging system initialization I would lvie to hear your use case - please file an issue.
Details
Let's go through the example config above and analyze configuration options (Note: Tags are case-insensitive).
Host (required)
Network host address of Loki instance. Either IP address or host name. It will be passed to Netty and end up being resolved
by call to InetSocketAddress.createUnresolved.
TODO: [#3](https://github.com/tkowalcz/tjahzi/issues/3) - Check what happens when IP address of a host changes (e.g. if it's a load balancer).
Port (required)
Self explanatory.
Header (optional)
This tag can be used multiple times to specify additional headers that are passed to Loki instance. One example is to pass
a X-Scope-OrgID header when running Loki in multi-tenant mode.
Label (optional)
Specify additional labels attached to each log line sent via this appender instance.
LICENSE
This work is released under MIT license. Feel free to use, copy and modify this work as long as you credit original authors. Pull and feature requests are welcome.