tracing-rfc-5424

Introduction

tracing-rfc-5424 is a tracing-subscriber Layer implementation that sends tracingEvents to a syslog daemon.

tracing is a "scoped, structured logging and diagnostics system". It provides a superset of the features offered by logging crates such as fern and log4rs particularly suited to asynchronous programming. Of particular interest is that it makes a very clear distinction between producers of events & their consumers (Subscribers, in tracing parlance); so much so that the tracing crate provides no support for consuming events, other than the definition of the Subscriber trait.

The tracing-subscriber crate (also part of the Tokio project) provides a few basic implementations along with "utilities for implementing and composing tracing subscribers." A key notion introduced by this crate is the idea of a Layer. "Unlike Subscribers, which implement a complete strategy for how trace data is collected, Layers provide modular implementations of specific behaviors." The concern here is that, in general, a consumer of tracing event data may want to do various things at the same time with that data: write it to a log file, just write it to stdout, shuttle it off to a log collection daemon, produce metrics based on it, and so on.

This could easily give rise to a geometric explosion in types: LogFile, LogFileWithStdout, LogFileWithLogStash, LogFileWithLogStashAndStdout, and so forth. The idea behind Layers is to decompose each facet of event handling into its own type, and then "stack them up" in a Subscriber as the application developer desires. In a sense, this design pattern is reminiscent of Alexandrescu's concept of traits classes in C++– a way of decomposing functionality into orthogonal facets and composing them linearly rather than geometrically.

tracing-rfc-5424 is a Layer implementation that sends Events (and, soon, Spans) to a syslog daemon. Both RFCs 3164 (BSD syslog) and 5424 are supported. Internet & Unix domain sockets are supported for transport, both in their datagram & stream flavors.

License

This crate is released under the GPL 3.0.

Prerequisites

Other than tracing and a syslog daemon, none. tracing-rfc-5424 was developed against rust 1.58.1, although tracing requires 1.49.

Installation

To add tracing-rfc-5424 to your crate, just say cargo add tracing-rfc-5424, or add it directly to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
tracing-rfc-5424 = "0.1.3"

Usage

To talk to a local syslog daemon over UDP:

use tracing::info;
use tracing_rfc_5424::{
    layer::Layer, rfc5424::Rfc5424, tracing::TrivialTracingFormatter, transport::UdpTransport,
};
use tracing_subscriber::{
    layer::SubscriberExt, // Needed to get `with()`
    registry::Registry,
};

// Setup the subsriber...
let subscriber = Registry::default()
    .with(Layer::<Layer::<tracing_subscriber::Registry, Rfc5424, TrivialTracingFormatter, UdpTransport>::try_default().unwrap());
// and install it.
let _guard = tracing::subscriber::set_default(subscriber);

info!("Hello, world!");
// Will produce a syslog line something like:
// Jun 23 16:10:55 my-host my-app[pid] Hello, world!

To talk to a local Unix socket:

use tracing::info;
use tracing_rfc_5424::{rfc3164::Rfc3164, tracing::TrivialTracingFormatter, transport::UnixSocket};
use tracing_subscriber::{
    layer::SubscriberExt, // Needed to get `with()`
    registry::Registry,
};

  // Setup the subsriber...
let subscriber = subscriber
    .with(tracing_rfc_5424::layer::Layer::<Layer::<tracing_subscriber::Registry, Rfc3164, TrivialTracingFormatter, UnixSocket>::try_default().unwrap());
// and install it.
let _guard = tracing::subscriber::set_default(subscriber);

info!("Hello, world!");

Status, Rationale and Roadmap

This is a preliminary release; the version number (0.1.x) is intended to convey that. See this crate's parent workspace for more on the roadmap.

Bugs, comments, problems, criticism, PRs, feature requests &c welcome at sp1ff@pobox.com and in the issues.