configure logging to use JSON by default so its easier to work with logstash?

[jstrachan]

for java/karaf/tomcat/wildfly images we should default to use JSON logging so that things just work nicely with logstash and elasticsearch?

[davsclaus]

Whoa you mean their container logging should be in some kind of json format. How would you do that?

[jstrachan]

yeah - using a logging pattern to output lines of text in json format.

We've 3 choices

• treat all logs as a single line of text (so no category / time / thread / breadcrumb)
• we log random output using arbitrary formats (whatever log4j.properties wins) then folks manually try figure out the regex expressions to then be able to parse into fields for dumping into Elasticsearch
• we log as json so that automatically all logs go nicely into Elasticsearch with no dodgy regex to maintain; and all the values such as breadcrumbs/threads/categories/levels are all nicely searchable

If we had a nice json log viewer, we could then do a nice coloured tail program so folks get nicer text output on their shells (properly colouring info/err/warning lines etc)?