logentries-client

Logentries Client (JS)

Allows you to send logs to your logentries account from Node or io.js.

It might work with Browserify, too, but you would need to use shims for net or tls (depending on whether you set secure to true). Such shims do exist, but I haven’t tested it.

Tested in Node v0.10 + and io.js. It probably works in Node 0.8 too, but one of the test libraries (mitm) doesn’t, so it remains unconfirmed.

• Start
• Options
• Log Levels
• Events
• Log Entries
• Methods
• Buffer & Connection Issues
• Using as a Winston ‘Transport’
• Using with Bunyan
• Setting Up With Logentries Itself
• Changelog

Start

var LogentriesClient = require('logentries-client');
 
var logger = new LogentriesClient({
    token: 'myAccessToken'
});
 
logger.warning('The kittens have become alarmingly adorable.')

Options

The options object you provide to the constructor only requires your access token, but you can configure its behavior further.

All of the following except token, levels and secure can also be configured after instantiation as settable properties on the client. They are accessors, though, and invalid values will be ignored.

Required

• token: String. Authorization token for the Logentries service.

Behavior

• console: If truthy, log events also get sent to console.log, console.warn and console.error as appropriate. Default: false.
• levels: Custom names for the 8 log levels and their corresponding methods. More details on this below.
• minLevel: The minimum level to actually record logs at. String or Number. Defaults to 0.
• secure: If truthy, uses a tls connection. Default: false.
• timeout: The time, in milliseconds, that inactivity should warrant closing the connection to the host until needed again. Defaults to three minutes.

Log Processing Options

• flatten: Convert objects into a single-level object where the values of interior objects become dot-notation properties of the root object. Defaults to false. More details on this below.
• flattenArrays: If flatten is true, you can also indicate whether arrays should be subject to the same process. Defaults to true if flatten is true; otherwise meaningless.
• replacer: A custom value-transform function to be used during JSON serialization. Applied before error transformation.
• timestamp: If truthy, prefix entries with an ISO timestamp (if strings) or add the same as a property (if objects). Default: false.
• withLevel: Will prepend (string) or add property (object) indicating the log level.
• withStack: If an object is or contains an Error object, setting this to true will cause the stack trace to be included. Default: false.

Other

• host: The host to send logs to. Normally you would not want to set this, but it may be useful for mocking during tests. The value may be just the host or the host with the port specified.
• port: As above. This will default to 80 if secure is false, or 443 if it’s true.

Log Levels

The default log levels are:

1. debug
2. info
3. notice
4. warning
5. err
6. crit
7. alert
8. emerg

You can provision the constructor with custom names for these levels with either an array or an object hash:

[ 'boring', 'yawn', 'eh', 'hey' ]
 
{ boring: 0, yawn: 1, eh: 2, hey: 3 }

In the former case, the index corresponds to the numeric level, so sparse arrays are valid. In either case, missing levels will be filled in with the defaults.

The minLevel option respects either level number (e.g. 2) or the name (e.g. 'eh').

The level names each become methods on the client, which are just sugar for calling client.log(lvl, logentry) with the first argument curried.

Since these names will appear on the client, they can’t collide with existing properties. Not that you’re particularly likely to try naming a log level ‘hasOwnProperty’ or ‘_write’ but I figured I should mention it.

So the following three are equivalent:

logger.notice('my msg');
logger.log('notice', 'my msg');
logger.log(2, 'my msg');

It’s also possible to forgo log levels altogether. Just call log with a single argument and it will be interpretted as the log entry. When used this way, the minLevel setting is ignored.

Events

The client is an EventEmitter, so you should (as always) make sure you have a listener on 'error'. The only other event is 'log' which fires when you’d expect. Error events can occur when there’s been a problem with the connection or if a method was called with invalid parameters.

Log Entries

Log entries can be strings or objects. If the log argument is an array, it will be interpretted as multiple log events.

Object Serialization

In the case of objects, the native JSON.stringify serialization is augmented in several ways. In addition to handling circular references, it will automatically take care of a variety of objects and primitives which otherwise wouldn’t serialize correctly, like Error, RegExp, Set, Map, Infinity, NaN, etc.

If you choose to set withStack to true, errors will include their stacktraces as an array (so that they are not painful to look at). Be sure to turn on "expand JSON" (meaning pretty print) in the options on logentries:

You can adjust this further by supplying your own custom replacer. This is a standard argument to JSON.stringify -- See MDN: JSON > Stringify > The Replacer Parameter for details. In the event that you supply a custom replacer, it is applied prior to the built-in replacer described above so you can override its behavior.

Optional Augmentation

Two options are available, timestamp and withLevel, which will add data to your log events. For objects, these are added as properties (non-mutatively). For strings, these values are prepended. If the name of a property would cause a collision with an existing property, it will be prepended with an underscore.

Flattening Log Objects

In some cases it will end up being easier to query your data if objects aren’t deeply nested. With the flatten and flattenArrays options, you can tell the client to transform an object like this:

• { "a": 1, "b": { "c": 2 } } => { "a": 1, "b.c": 2 }

If flattenArrays has not been set to false, this transformation will apply to arrays as well:

• { "a": [ "b", { "c": 3 } ] } => { "a.0": "b", "a.1.c": 3 }

Methods

In addition to log and its arbitrary sugary cousins, you can call closeConnection to explicitly close an open connection if one exists; you might wish to do this as part of a graceful exit. The connection will reopen if you log further.

Also, because the client is actually a writable stream, you can call write directly. This gives you lower-level access to writing entries. It is in object mode, but this means it expects discreet units (one call = one entry), not actual objects; you should pass in strings. This is useful if you want to pipe stdout, for example.

Buffer & Connection Issues

If there’s a problem with the connection, entries will be buffered to a max of 60 entries. After that, error events will be emitted when trying to log further. If the buffer drains, normal logging can resume. If console is true, these log entries will still pass through there, but they will not make it to LogEntries.

If the connection fails, it will retry with an exponential backoff for several minutes. If it does not succeed in that time, an error is emitted. A ‘ban’ will be placed on further attempts but it will lift after some more time has passed, at which point the process can repeat (and hopefully work).

A connection to the host does not guarantee that your logs are transmitting successfully. If you have a bad token, there is no feedback from the server to indicate this. The only way to confirm that your token is working is to check the live tail on Logentries. I will investigate this further to see if there’s some other means with which a token can be tested for validity.

Using as a Winston ‘Transport’

If Winston is included in your package.json dependencies, simply requiring the Logentries client will place the transport constructor at winston.transports, even if Winston itself hasn’t yet been required.

var winston = require('winston');
var LogentriesClient = require('logentries-client');
 
winston.add(winston.transports.Logentries, opts);

The usual options are supported. If custom levels are not provided, Winston’s defaults will be used.

In the hard-to-imagine case where you’re using Winston without including it in package.json, you can explicitly provision the transport by first requiring Winston and then calling LogentriesClient.provisionWinston().

Using with Bunyan

For Bunyan it’s like so:

var bunyan = require('bunyan');
 
var LogentriesClient = require('logentries-client');
 
var leBunyan = LogentriesClient.bunyanStream(opts);
 
// One stream
var logger = bunyan.createLogger(leBunyan);
 
// Multiple streams
var logger = bunyan.createLogger({
    name: 'whatevs',
    streams: [ leBunyan, otherStream ]
});

Note that with Bunyan, only the first six log levels will be used, and timestamps are provided by Bunyan already. Other options are the same. If after creation you wish to change the minimum log level, use Bunyan’s methods. The stream will be named ‘logentries,’ though you can change it on the object returned by bunyanStream().

Setting Up With Logentries Itself

When you create an account at Logentries (just a standard signup form; there’s a free tier), you can find the token you need. It’s shown during the initial walk- through but you can find it later under Logs/Hosts/{ the name of your host } -- on the far right, a gray TOKEN button that you can click to reveal the string.

That’s it -- once you have the token you’re set.

Changelog

1.0.0

• Major overhaul -- rewrote in ES6
• Client is now a writable stream, compatible with stdout
• Added withLevel and timeout options
• Exposed host and port options for testing
• Expanded default serialization to handle more JSON-choking cases, including Map, Set and Symbol
• Added more sanity checks on instantiation
• Made 'level' argument optional when calling client.log
• BREAKING CHANGE: client.log method no longer accepts an arbitrary number of log entry arguments (to support above case, which seems much likely to be useful)
• Added custom, informative error objects
• Changed default minLevel value to zero (1 was an accident)
• The most significant changes concern handling the connection to the host:
  • An exponential backoff is used when connecting fails
  • After repeated failures, a cooldown period is enforced before further tries
  • The buffer of pending entries has a maximum now (60)
  • Errors get emitted when these conditions occur

0.5.0

• Added flatten and flattenArray options
• Added more special cases for the default serializer
• Added new tests

0.4.0

• Prevented mutation of incoming log objects when adding timestamp or level
• Turned thrown strings into proper errors (oops!)
• Updated dependencies

0.3.3

• Switched to the new API endpoint

0.3.1 & 0.3.2

• Readme updated

0.3.0

• Improved stack trace handling when withStack set to true

0.2.1

• Path for problems with new 0.2.0 options
• Added new tests

0.2.0

• Added proper handling for objects with circular references
• Added custom serialization for Error objects & withStack option
• Changed lodash to runInContext() to prevent template string problems

0.1.0

• Initial release