When you deploy an application with Clever Cloud, it’s not just delivered online and maintained in operational condition. It also comes with a range of services and dedicated features to help you operate it all along its lifecycle. One of these is our log stack.
We upgraded it last year to rely on Vector for emission, Apache Pulsar for ingestion and consumption, while ensuring isolation between each user (multi-tenant) and each application. The previous solution had shown its limitations and prevented us from delivering some enhancements. Our main objective was to improve our users’ experience on many different levels.
A new Logs experience at Clever Cloud
We’ve been using it successfully in our Clever Tools command line interface (CLI) for several months now. You can view your logs live, download those for a given time window, or even filter them, with the results available in a variety of formats. Documentation is available here. Of course, this feature is based on our APIv4, which is also documented there.
The next step was to integrate this new technical brick into the Console. This was an opportunity for us to rethink the section dedicated to logs so that it exploited our Web Components and met our criteria in terms of usability, functionality and accessibility. Our team spent several months rethinking it from top to bottom.
After an internal testing phase, it is now available in beta to all our customers. They can choose it by clicking on a simple link in the interface, and return to the old one whenever they want. Our objective is to continuously improve this section, and then gradually extend it to all our services. To share your feedback, we’ve created a community space on GitHub for the purpose:
A myriad of details…
The previous interface allowed you to browse your latest deployments and their various instances one by one. The new interface goes one step further, listing by default all deployments and instances of an application over the last 7 days. The logs of the most recent deployment will be loaded, but you can also add or remove those of the instance of your choice. Each deployment is identified by the hash of the related code commit, with instances numbered (in the case of horizontal scalability).
You can reduce the time window to a few days or a few hours, or even manually indicate start and end times, which is useful when you’re looking for specific information, for example, when tracking down a bug. You also have a text filter above the main area. It will evolve with the introduction of an indexing mechanism that will open up new possibilities in this area.
Of course, you can also follow the publication of your logs live. This will be the section displayed by default when a deployment is in progress.
… and of features
The main area lets you select one or more lines with the keyboard and mouse via the gutter on the left, with the option of copying the result to the clipboard just as simply by pressing CTRL+C/Cmd+C. At the top right you’ll find a button to set the area to full screen, another to return to the bottom of your logs and a settings area.
Although it’s still new, it’s already quite complete and uses our new API for user settings. It lets you choose between different light/dark themes, remove colors and ANSI codes, line wrap or not, define a format for date and time, choose whether to display in your time zone or in UTC, distinguish instances by name, etc. Of course, this is subject to change, so don’t hesitate to make suggestions.
We’ll keep you posted on future improvements in our Changelog (via its RSS feed), or on this blog for the next big steps between now and general availability. Don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn or X/Twitter to keep up to date.