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Logs Java API Overview

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  1. Overview
  2. Getting log data
  3. Log URL formats in App Engine and developer consoles
  4. How to read a log
  5. Quotas and limits

Overview

The Logs API provides access to the application and request logs for your application. You can also access the logs for your application in the Logs Viewer provided in the Google Developers Console by clicking Monitoring > Logs in the left navigation panel

Log categories: request logs and app logs

There are two categories of log data: request logs and application logs. A request log is written for each request handled by your app, and contains information such as the app ID, HTTP version, and so forth. For a complete list of available properties for request logs, see RequestLogs.

Each request log contains a list of application logs (AppLogLine) associated with that request, returned in the RequestLogs.getAppLogLines() method. Each app log contains the time the log was written, the log message, and the log level.

Getting log data

The general process of getting logs is as follows:

  1. Use LogQuery to specify which logs to return.
  2. Use LogServiceFactory.getLogService() to create the LogService
  3. Invoke LogServiceFactory.getLogService().fetch() to return an iterator for the request logs.
  4. In each iteration, for each RequestLogs, process the request properties as desired.
  5. Optionally, use RequestLogs.getAppLogLines() to get the list of app logs (AppLogLine) associated with this request.
  6. If you retrieved the app logs list, for each AppLogLine, process the property data as desired.

Sample code

The following sample displays 5 request logs at at time, along with their application logs. It lets you cycle through each set of 5 logs using a Next link.

package testapp;

import java.io.IOException;
import javax.servlet.http.*;
import com.google.appengine.api.log.*;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.util.Calendar;

// Get request logs along with their app log lines and display them 5 at
// a time, using a Next link to cycle through to the next 5.
public class TestAppServlet extends HttpServlet {
  @Override
  public void doGet(HttpServletRequest req, HttpServletResponse resp)
         throws IOException {

    resp.setContentType("text/html");
    PrintWriter writer = resp.getWriter();
    // We use this to break out of our iteration loop, limiting record
    // display to 5 request logs at a time.
    int limit = 5;

    // This retrieves the offset from the Next link upon user click.
    String offset = req.getParameter("offset");

    // We want the App logs for each request log
    LogQuery query = LogQuery.Builder.withDefaults();
    query.includeAppLogs(true);

    // Set the offset value retrieved from the Next link click.
    if (offset != null) {
      query.offset(offset);
    }

    // This gets filled from the last request log in the iteration
    String lastOffset = null;
    int i = 0;

    // Display a few properties of each request log.
    for (RequestLogs record : LogServiceFactory.getLogService().fetch(query)) {
      writer.println("<br />REQUEST LOG <br />");
      Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
      cal.setTimeInMillis(record.getStartTimeUsec() / 1000);

      writer.println("IP: " + record.getIp()+"<br />");
      writer.println("Method: " + record.getMethod()+"<br />");
      writer.println("Resource " + record.getResource()+"<br />");
      writer.println(String.format("<br />Date: %s", cal.getTime().toString()));

      lastOffset = record.getOffset();

      // Display all the app logs for each request log.
      for (AppLogLine appLog : record.getAppLogLines()) {
        writer.println("<br />"+ "APPLICATION LOG" +"<br />");
        Calendar appCal = Calendar.getInstance();
        appCal.setTimeInMillis(appLog.getTimeUsec() / 1000);
        writer.println(String.format("<br />Date: %s",
                            appCal.getTime().toString()));
        writer.println("<br />Level: "+appLog.getLogLevel()+"<br />");
        writer.println("Message: "+ appLog.getLogMessage()+"<br /> <br />");
      } //for each log line

      if (++i >= limit) {
        break;
      }
    } // for each record

    // When the user clicks this link, the offset is processed in the
    // GET handler and used to cycle through to the next 5 request logs.
    writer.println(String.format("<br><a href=\"/?offset=%s\">Next</a>",
                             lastOffset));
  }  // end doGet
} //end class

In the sample, notice that the GET handler expects to be re-invoked by the user clicking on the Next link, and so it extracts the offset param, if present. That offset is used in the subsequent re-invocation of LogServiceFactory.getLogService().fetch() to "page through" each group of 5 request logs. There is nothing special about the number 5; it can be anything you want.

Log URL formats in App Engine and developer consoles

The log URL format is different in the App Engine Admin Console compared to the Google Developers console. In particular, the Google Developers console does not have the filter_type, as can be seen in the following sample log URLs:

App Engine Admin Console format:

https://appengine.google.com/logs?app_id=s~blablas1&filter_type=labels&filter=request_id%000000efdb00ff00ff827e493472570001737e73686966746361727331000168656164000100

Google Developer Console format:

https://console.developers.google.com/project/blablas1/logs?filters=request_id:000000db00ff00ff827e493472570001737e73686966746361727331000168656164000100

How to read a log

To view logs using the Log Viewer:

  1. Visit the developer console in your browser.

  2. Open the project whose logs you wish to see and select Compute > App Engine > Logs.

  3. Use the desired filter to retrieve the logs you want to see. You can filter by various combinations of time, log level, module, and log filter label or regular expression.

    Notice that labels are regular expressions for filtering the logs by logging fields. Valid labels include the following:

    • day
    • month
    • year
    • hour
    • minute
    • second
    • tzone
    • remotehost
    • identd_user
    • user
    • status
    • bytes
    • referrer
    • useragent
    • method
    • path
    • querystring
    • protocol
    • request_id

    For example, path:/foo.* useragent:.*Chrome.* gets logs for all requests to a path starting with /foo that were issued from a Chrome browser.

A typical App Engine log contains data in the Apache combined log format, along with some special App Engine fields, as shown in the following sample log:

192.0.2.0 test [27/Jun/2014:09:11:47 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 414 -
"http://www.example.com/index.html"
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.153 Safari/537.36"
"1-dot-calm-sylph-602.appspot.com" ms=195 cpu_ms=42 cpm_usd=0.000046
loading_request=1 instance=00c61b117cfeb66f973d7df1b7f4ae1f064d app_engine_release=1.9.19

The following table lists the fields in order of occurrence along with a description:

Field Order Field Name Always Present? Description
1 Client address Yes Client IP address. Example: 192.0.2.0
2 RFC1413 identity No RFC1413 identity of the client. This is nearly always the character -
3 User No Present only if the app uses the Users API and the user is logged in. This value is the "nickname" portion of the Google Account, for example, if the Google Account is test@example.com, the nickname that is logged in this field is test.
4 Timestamp Yes Request timestamp. Example: [27/Jun/2014:09:11:47 -0700]
5 Request querystring Yes First line of the request, containing method, path, and HTTP version. Example: GET / HTTP/1.1
6 HTTP Status Code Yes Returned HTTP status code. Example: 200
7 Response size Yes Response size in bytes. Example: 414
8 Referrer path No If there is no referrer, the log contains no path, but only -. Example referrer path: "http://www.example.com/index.html".
9 User-agent Yes Identifies the browser and operating system to the web server. Example: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.153 Safari/537.36
10 Hostname Yes The hostname used by the client to connect to the App Engine application. Example : (1-dot-calm-sylph-602.appspot.com)
11 Wallclock time Yes Total clock time in milliseconds spent by App Engine on the request. This time duration does not include time spent between the client and the server running the instance of your application. Example: ms=195.
12 CPU milliseconds Yes CPU milliseconds required to fulfill the request. This is the number of milliseconds spent by the CPU actually executing your application code, expressed in terms of a baseline 1.2 GHz Intel x86 CPU. If the CPU actually used is faster than the baseline, the CPU milliseconds can be larger than the actual clock time defined above. Example: cpu_ms=42
13 Exit code No Only present if the instance shut down after getting the request. In the format exit_code=XXX where XXX is a 3 digit number corresponding to the reason the instance shut down. The exit codes are not documented since they are primarily intended to help Google spot and fix issues.
14 Estimated cost Yes Estimated cost of 1000 requests just like this one, in USD. Example: cpm_usd=0.000046
15 Queue name No The name of the task queue used. Only present if request used a task queue. Example: queue_name=default
16 Task name No The name of the task executed in the task queue for this request. Only present if the request resulted in the queuing of a task. Example: task_name=7287390692361099748
17 Pending queue No Only present if a request spent some time in a pending queue. If there are many of these in your logs and/or the values are high, it might be an indication that you need more instances to serve your traffic. Example: pending_ms=195
18 Loading request No Only present if the request is a loading request. This means an instance had to be started up. Ideally, your instances should be up and healthy for as long as possible, serving large numbers of requests before being recycled and needing to be started again. Which means you shouldn't see too many of these in your logs. Example: loading_request=1.
19 Instance Yes Unique identifier for the instance that handles the request. Example: instance=00c61b117cfeb66f973d7df1b7f4ae1f064d
20 Version Yes The current App Engine release version used in production App Engine: 1.9.19

Quotas and limits

Your application is affected by the following logs-related quotas:

  • Logs data retrieved via the Logs API.
  • Log storage, also called logs retention.

Quota for data retrieved

The first 100 megabytes of logs data retrieved per day via the Logs API calls are free. After this amount is exceeded, no further Logs API calls will succeed unless billing is enabled for your app. If billing is enabled for your app, data in excess of 100 megabytes results in charges of $0.12/GB.

Logs storage

You can control how much log data your application stores by means of its log retention settings in the Admin Console. By default, logs are stored for an application free of charge with the following per-application limits: a maximum of 1 gigabyte for a maximum of up to 90 days. If either limit is exceeded, more recent logs will be shown and older logs will be deleted to stay within the size limit. Logs older than the maximum retention time are also deleted.

If your app has billing enabled, you can pay for higher log size limits by specifying the desired maximum log size in gigabytes in the Admin Console. You can also set the retention time by specifying the desired number of days to keep logs, up to a maximum of 365 days. The cost of this extra log storage is $0.026 per gigabyte utilized per month.

Limit Amount Cost past free threshold
Maximum days storage per log 90 days free, 365 days if paid $0.026 per gigabyte utilized per month
Maximum total logs storage 1 gigabyte free, unlimited if paid $0.026 per gigabyte utilized per month

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