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Configure Logging

Setting up Logging

Do not use logging to send personal data such as names or email addresses to AppSignal. If you want to identify a person, consider using a user ID, hash, or pseudonymized identifier instead.

This documentation will take you through all the necessary steps and additional information needed when adding a new log source to your application.

Creating a Log Source

You do not need to create a log source when sending logs directly from an AppSignal integration. A log source will be automatically created for you. Follow the instructions for logging from AppSignal integrations.

To send logs to AppSignal, you'll first need to configure your log sources. Your application could have many log sources, like a database or app process. You will need to do this once per log source. For example, if you want to send MongoDB and NGINX logs to AppSignal, you'd need to create a source for each of these integrations.

Screenshot of Logging Sources page

To do this, navigate to the Logging page in the AppSignal application and click on the Add log source button in the top right of the page. A pop-up will appear, prompting you to name your source. It's important to give your source a descriptive name like Redis or MongoDB so that you can successfully query these logs in the future.

Add new Log Source form

Choose Your Platform

Are you setting up logging for Vercel? There are some additional steps required when creating a Vercel log source. Read our Vercel Configuration documentation for step-to-step setup instructions.

We support sending logs to AppSignal from various sources and platforms and are hard at work to add support for more. You can find out more about the platforms supported in this documentation's Platform Configuration section.

If your platform is not listed, you can send logs to one of our endpoints directly.

Choose The Message Format

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.

Some sources are based on a third-party integration, where you can't control the format of the log line. In this case, you can choose the format of the log line that AppSignal will attempt to parse the message from.

This allows you to add structure to your log lines, without controlling the surrounding log line format. For example, if you use the Netlify integration, which takes care of sending log lines to AppSignal in their own format, allowing us to extract the correct time and hostname, you can choose the json log format to add additional attributes to a log line.

When we support parsing the log message, we support these formats:

Read more about how to format your messages in the Formatting Documentation.

Create Source

Once you've chosen the name and format of your new source is created, it will be listed in the Log Sources table on the Logs page, alongside a generated API key.

Screenshot of Log Sources table highlighting API key

You will now need to configure your application to send logs to AppSignal using one of the platforms we support.

Platform Configuration

Once you've created a new source, you'll need to configure your application to send logs to AppSignal. This should be via the same platform you defined when creating your log source.

Supported Logging Platforms

Supported Logging Endpoints

Completing Setup

As AppSignal only stores logs that are sent to it from your application, you will only be able to see logs created after you've completed your configuration.

Once you've configured your chosen platform, you'll be able to view and query your logs from the All logs page in the AppSignal application. There's more information on how to manage, view, and query your logs in this guide's next step.

Screenshot of expanded log

If you've followed the above steps and cannot to see any logs in AppSignal, you may want to read our Troubleshooting Guide or reach out to us for assistance.