Advanced logging – the last few messages and network destinations
We'll look at two more advanced techniques that can help provide useful debugging information. The first of these is a log tail: this is a buffer of the last few log messages before some significant event. The idea is to have a small file that can be read to see the last few log messages before an application died. It's a bit like having the OS tail command automatically applied to the full log output.
The second technique uses a feature of the logging framework to send log messages through a network to a centralized log-handling service. This can be used to consolidate logs from a number of parallel web servers. We need to create both senders and receivers for the logs.
Building an automatic tail buffer
The log tail buffer is an extension to the logging framework. We're going to extend MemoryHandler to slightly alter its behavior. The built-in behavior for MemoryHandler includes three use cases for writing: it will write to...
