Viewing logs with Kibana¶

Roundtable includes its own logging infrastructure. Your application’s log messages to stdout and stderr are automatically captured by fluentd, stored in ElasticSearch, and made available with Kibana. This page will help you use Kibana to view your app’s log messages.

Note

To follow this tutorial, you will need kubectl access to the Roundtable cluster. See How to connect to the Roundtable GKE cluster from the web or kubectl.

Step 1: Port forward into the Kibana pod¶

Kibana is the front-end for viewing your logs. Currently, Kibana does not have a public URL. To access Kibana, you’ll need to set up port forwarding between the Kibana pod in Roundtable and your localhost. Copy this line and run it in a terminal:

kubectl -n logging port-forward `kubectl -n logging get pods -l app=logging-opendistro-es -l role=kibana -o name | head -n 1` 5601:5601

Step 2: Log into Kibana¶

Open http://localhost:5601 in your browser.
Enter the credentials:

Username

admin

Password

admin

Step 3: Explore with the Discover tab¶

The best place to start exploring log messages is in the Discover tab: http://localhost:5601/app/kibana#/discover.

By default you can see every log message from across the entire Roundtable cluster. Here are a few tips to help filter the log stream down to just the messages you’re interested in:

You can filter messages based on the values you see. To do that, mouse over the log messages. A magnifying glass appears:
- If the message has a value you’re interested in, click the magnifying glass with a “+” symbol inside it. Now only messages containing that value are shown.
- If the message is one you’re not interested in, click the magnifying glass with a “-” symbol inside it. Now messages containing that value aren’t shown.
Create filters based on Kubernetes labels. For example, a partial pod resource might look like this:
```
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  labels:
    name: myapp
```
You can select log messages this pod, and ones like it in a Deployment, based on the name: myapp label:
1. Click on the + Add filter button, located below the search bar.
2. For field, enter kubernetes.labels.name (change as appropriate for the label).
3. For operator, select “is.” Alternatively, “is in” is useful for combining multiple log sources together.
4. For value, enter the value of the label (myapp, in this example).
Create filters based on Kubernetes namespaces using the field kubernetes.namespace_name, following the same technique as above.
Enter a plain text search. If you’re looking for something specific, type it into the search box.

Learning more¶

The official Kibana Guide is a great resource for learning more about Kibana.

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