AppSignal Logging
Quick access to your application's logs can be essential when debugging incidents and evaluating the overall health of the various processes running on your application, from your database to your messaging queue.
AppSignal Logging centralizes your application's logs allowing you to store, view, and query your application's logs, giving you extra insight into your application's performance and behavior.
Our documentation covers everything you need to know to get AppSignal Logging up and running with your application.
Limitations
This feature was designed and built to fill the gaps in observability that are left after using our APM features to the fullest. For example: Seeing slow query logs directly from your database, logging activity in an admin, logging of outgoing API calls succeeded. There are a lot of use cases where a log can give useful information to assist with debugging a problem.
AppSignal Logging therefore has some limitations. Our logging feature does not support logging deeply nested JSON payloads. And we have a limit of about 2 million individual log lines per minute per app.
We recommend using the errors and performance features for monitoring of your requests. These support advanced use cases such as setting nested custom data.
Supported AppSignal Integrations
The following AppSignal integrations feature out-of-the-box support for AppSignal Logging:
Best Practices
To log or not to log, that can be a tricky question to answer. The best kinds of logs are descriptive, contextual, and concise. With AppSignal, you can get the most out of your logs by utilizing features like custom attributes, which allow you to add additional, filterable data to your log lines.
You can read our Learning Center article on logging best practices for more information on properly utilizing your application logs.
Log Retention
Your log data must not contain any personal data, such as names, email addresses, etc. It is your responsibility to ensure this data is filtered out before being sent to AppSignal, and when identifying a person is necessary that your application uses alternative forms of identification such as a user ID, hash, or pseudonym.
We ensure details such as stack traces for slow requests and exceptions are available for at least 30 days. Retention will vary depending on your plan. Your application's other metrics (performance characteristics, error rates, etc.) are available forever as historical data.
You can find actual retention and pricing information on our plans page.