How does json logging work

You can turn JSON, or structured, logging on by setting CORDITE_LOG_MODE=json in the docker environment variables. If you do this, beware of a few things:

• each log line is a flat JSON object with strings mapping to strings
• the severities are mapped on to stack driver severity levels
• MDC properties tip up as entries in the JSON object
• you can put as many [key=value] bits in your log message and each one will be stripped out of the message and will show up in the JSON object
• Jolokia agent is serving on port 7005 unless JVM_ARGS are over-ridden

You might well be asking why on earth we want to do this. A number of reasons:

• in this way we can get Stackdriver and other JSON based monitoring solution not to interpret every message as INFO level!
• we can use the MDC for tracking requests across the entire cluster that we are monitoring - perhaps using session id, or some other discrim like txnId
• we can mark up various log messages as having certain types - we can then use this to slice and dice the messages - in particular we could figure out how much time we spend in certain blocks, or how often we call a method, but across a whole cluster, or within a certain type of transaction.