Logging Best Practices

Intro

The Curity Identity Server writes a number of different types of logs. In this article we will summarize the behavior and describe some best practices for managing them. This will ensure that you can manage the Curity Identity Server at scale and troubleshoot effectively. Many companies will be already using similar techniques for their own APIs.

Loggers

Logs for the Curity Identity Server are written using the highly extensible log4j2 framework and details of how it can be customized are provided in the Curity Logging Documentation. Multiple loggers are used, each of which represents a different area of data. For technical support purposes the following logs are most frequently consulted:

Log Visualization

The Curity Identity Server logging has built in support for visualizing logs in color when required, to integrate with the Logfile Navigator. See the Curity lnav extensions for details, which will enable you to visualize logs via the following type of command:

$IDSVR_HOME/bin/idsvr | tee -i $IDSVR_HOME/var/log/request.log | lnav

Application Specific Logs

If you ever need to drill deeper into a problem for a specific application, you can extend the logging behavior on a per-client basis, to capture more verbose details. The Per-client Debug Logging explores this topic further.

Basic Log Management

A default installation of the Curity Identity Server will store logs files locally on servers. The system log is written to standard output (i.e. "stdout") and cloud platforms will also capture this as a file.

In a real world system you may then have many thousands of logs output per day, so that understanding important logging events is a challenge. If logging is left in the default state, then the following capabilities will be sub-optimal:

Log Aggregation Components

For these reasons, it is recommended to use log aggregation for production systems under load, as part of your log management solution. This will require the following type of third-party component:

In order to integrate with a log aggregation system, the Curity Identity Server needs to be configured accordingly. An example setup for the Kubernetes platform is shown below, and once understood this can also be adapted to other hosting architectures:

The diagram shows a number of Kubernetes components, where the log shipper runs in a different container to the Curity Identity Server, and therefore has no impact on its performance:

JSON Log Files

In a cloud native setup, logs end up as files on each node from which a log shipper can easily pick them up. Kubernetes stores these files in a /var/log/containers folder:

By default only the system logs are written here, though our Helm Chart enables you to include other logs by editing the details for the runtime node, setting stdout=true, then selecting extra logs that should be written to the virtual machine. In the following configuration the request logs are also being aggregated:

runtime:
    role: default
    service:
      type: ClusterIP
      port: 8443
    livenessProbe:
      timeoutSeconds: 1
      failureThreshold: 3
      periodSeconds: 10
      initialDelaySeconds: 120
    readinessProbe:
      timeoutSeconds: 1
      failureThreshold: 3
      successThreshold: 3
      periodSeconds: 10
      initialDelaySeconds: 120
    logging:
      image: "busybox:latest"
      level: INFO
      stdout: true
      logs:
      - request
#        - audit
#        - request
#        - cluster
#        - confsvc
#        - confsvc-internal
#        - post-commit-scripts

The result is that Curity runtime nodes are then deployed as multi-container pods, where additional small containers do the job of tailing logs in order for the platform to pick them up. This can be visualized if you run a kubectl describe command against a runtime node:

The mechanism of logging to files and then tailing logs is high performance and follows best practices described in Using Log4j in Cloud Enabled Applications.

Log Formats

Logs are output using layouts and a PatternLayout is used by default, which outputs a line of text. The JsonLayout usually works best when using log aggregation, where logs are written in a bare JSON format, with one logging event per line:

<JSONLayout compact="true" eventEol="true" properties="true" stacktraceAsString="true">
    <KeyValuePair key="hostname" value="${env:HOSTNAME}" />
    <KeyValuePair key="timestamp" value="$${date:yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSZ}" />
</JSONLayout>

This maintains the structure of each logged row and the type of each field, and note that two additional fields were also added, which can be useful for querying later:

If you need more fine grained control over the JSON data written to files, the JSON Template Layout provides powerful options and complete control over the log format.

Log Data Sensitivity

In production systems, it is recommend to set the log level for the se.curity, the io.curity and the root loggers to INFO, which ensures secure logs and also good log performance:

<AsyncRoot level="INFO">
    <AppenderRef ref="rewritten-stdout"/>
    <AppenderRef ref="request-log"/>
    <AppenderRef ref="metrics"/>
</AsyncRoot>

At any log level, data is masked to ensure that no Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is recorded, such as user names, emails or passwords.

Log Schemas

Server Log Fields

The server log contains warning and error events, and exception stack traces will be written here in soem cases, such as a JDBC database connection failure.

Request Log Fields

This log outputs information about each HTTP request that the Curity Identity Server processes:

Log Ingestion

When log aggregation systems receive a logging event, it is common to transform data, to ensure that important fields are available for querying later:

Production Log Access

Log aggregation systems support various types of user authentication, so that you can control access by user. Since the Curity Identity Server logs do not contain sensitive data, you should be able to grant technical support staff access to these systems to view production logs.

When technical support staff need to look at logs for the Curity Identity Server, they will then be able to simply log in to this system, with no need for an IT administrator to be involved. Queries can then be issued, to enable the user to focus on an understandable subset of the production logs:

If technical support staff cannot resolve an issue themselves and need to consult Curity, this type of setup will also ensure that the correct logs can be quickly exported.

Modern Troubleshooting

Once the data is aggregated in the right format, support staff can use the log aggregation system's features to perform live analysis in many ways, to troubleshoot effectively when required:

Tutorial Walkthrough

A Kubernetes Logging Tutorial is provided to demonstrate the concepts in this article, using the open source Elastic Stack system. Once understood, the patterns should be straightforward to follow in any similar log aggregation system.

Conclusion

The Curity Identity Server has a sophisticated logging architecture to enable effective technical support. Whatever your logging preferences, this will enable you to support your Identity and Access Management (IAM) system at scale. Aim for a setup where you can issue live real time queries across the whole cluster, so that your technical support people can quickly filter on only the relevant data.

Published: 2021-11-09

Gary Archer

Product Marketing Engineer at Curity