Grafana Log Explorer

Note

The Log Explorer is only available if Grafana Loki was enabled during deployment.

The Grafana Explorer can be used to view the logs of different components, such as the backend or user sessions. The logs are stored persistently, so administrators can also view the logs of already terminated sessions, for example to investigate an unexpected session termination.

The Grafana Explorer is available to administrators and can be accessed from the Grafana link in the main menu. Select "Explore" to access the log explorer:

Select the Correct Source

Before you can view logs, you must make sure that the correct source is selected for the Capella Collaboration Manager. For this please select Loki (Capella Collaboration Manager) in the data source picker.

Time Range Selector

Even though Loki is quite efficient, it is still not feasible to always query all the data, so you need to select the time range for which you want to see the logs, or use the default "Last 1 hour" time range. To change the time range, open the drop-down menu in the top right corner and select the time range you want to see.

Label Filters

The application logs are stored in Loki, which uses labels to store and retrieve logs efficiently. This means that each log in Loki has a set of labels assigned to it, where a label is essentially a key-value pair.

You have to select at least one label and a corresponding value to query logs. To do this, open the Select Label drop-down, select a label, and then click Select Value, which will load the values that exist for the label and allow you to select a value.

It is also possible to add multiple label filters by clicking the plus icon. When you do this, you must first select a label and value for the first filter, and when you select the second label, you will only see labels that can be combined with the first filter. For example, if the first filter limits the logs to backend logs, you won't be able to select anything else, while if the first filter limits the logs to session logs, you can further restrict the tool, version, etc.

You can query logs of different components by selecting the following labels:

• Management portal logs: If you want to query the logs of the management portal, make use of the deployment label to select a component of the management portal.
• Session logs: If you want to query the logs of a specific session, you can use the username label to select the user, and the session_type label to select the session type. You can also use the tool and version labels to further specify the session.
• Pipeline logs: If you want to query the logs of a pipeline, you can use the pipeline_run_id label to select the pipeline run. The pipeline run identifiers are listed in the pipeline run overview of a pipeline.

Here is an example filter how to select all sessions for version 7.0.0.

Operations

Now as you have some logs selected by the label filters, there are some useful operations that you can run. Due to the large number of supported operations, this guide will only cover examples that are often used in our context.

Line Contains

The line contains operations that essentially search the log messages for the text you want to find.

Backend Logfmt

For our backend logs, we follow the logfmt, which provides more structure to the log lines and is especially useful when used with Loki/Grafana. The reason for this is that you can use the Logfmt operation to convert the key-value pairs in our logs to labels. These labels can then be used to filter the logs more fine-grained and efficiently.

Here is an example operation sequence where you can query all logs that have the log level INFO and the HTTP method POST.

Theoretically, you could achieve the same result by changing two line contains operations, but it's inefficient and you have to use the exact format as in the log message.

Run Query

Once you have selected the appropriate label filters, added your operations, and the time range for which you want to see the logs, you can execute the query by clicking the query by clicking the Run Query button in the upper right corner. The logs will then be queried, which may take a moment depending on the time range you have selected and then displayed in the logs view (if you do not see it, just scroll down a bit).