Tag Archives: loggest

The joy of integrated logging and log viewing with fancy logs

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The deuxdrop messaging experiment‘s current incarnation exists as an (under development) Jetpack that runs in Firefox.  I am still trying to shake out functionality to be driven by the UI rather than headless unit tests.  While firebug has been a great help, another boon has been the logging framework and log viewing framework developed for the unit tests.  (Previous posts here and here).  Since the log is made up of structured JSON data, all the log processing logic is written in JS, and the log viewing UI is HTML/CSS/JS, it is trivial to embed the log viewer into the Jetpack itself.

If you type about:loggest in the URL bar (or better yet, create a bookmark on the bookmark bar and click that), the log viewer is displayed.  Deuxdrop’s client daemon logic (which runs in a hidden frame), uses a log reaper that runs at 1-second intervals.  If anything happens log-wise during that second, it is packaged and added to a circular-buffer style list of the last 60 seconds where anything happened.  When the log viewer starts up, it asks for and receives the data.  The result looks like the above small screenshot.  If no errors were logged during the time interval, it is automatically collapsed.

Let us experience the joy of integrated logging by looking at a real problem I recently encountered.  In the development UI (accessible via about:dddev), I brought up a list of my contacts after starting a conversation.  It looks like this right now:

The problem is that I, the user, am “Andrew Sutherland” and should not be in my own contact list.  Also, the display should not be claiming there are an undefined number of unread messages from me, but that is likely fallout from the system intentionally not maintaining such information about me, the user.

I want to quickly figure out why this is happening, so I bring up about:loggest and open the most recent time entry to see what happened when this query was issued and filled:

I can see that the query ended up issuing database requests for both Walternate (purple) and myself (green), strongly suggesting that the database index being queried on names me.

I wonder if the conversation processing logic was the code that did this… let’s check by going to the time slice where the conversation was processed, expanding it, and only screenshotting some of it:

Yes, the conversation logic did this.  It’s generating index values in the peepData table for the idxPeepAny and idxPeepRecip indices.  But I thought my unit tests covered this?  Nope.  It turns that although we test that a peep query returns the right thing both cold from the database and inductively via notifications as contact relationships are established, we don’t issue a new query after creating a conversation.  Furthermore, we only issued queries against the alphabetical index, not against idxPeepAny.  So we rectify that by augmenting the unit test:

  // - make sure that the conversation addition did not screw up our peeps list
  T.group('check peeps list after conversation join');
  lqFinalAllPeeps = moda_a.do_queryPeeps("allPeepsFinal:any", {by: 'any'});

And the test indeed now fails:

The relevant bit is in the lower right, which I blow up here with the “unexpected event” obj popup displayed above it, and the “failed expectation” obj popup below it.  The postAnno stuff is to indicate what is new in the query result.  Because it’s a freshly issued query and this is the first set of results, everything is new.  It’s probably worth noting that these errors would usually show up as a single “mismatched” error instead of an unexpected/failed pair in our tests, but the specific logger was operating in unordered set mode because we don’t care about the exact order that different query notifications occur in, we just care that they do occur.

(The structure is intended to later be enhanced to provide a nicer visualization where we only show the contents of the “state” attribute and use preAnno to indicate annotations on a representation of the most recent state for the object (from a previous log entry) and postAnno to indicate annotations on the now-current representation “state”.  For postAnno, values of 1 represent an addition, and values of 0 represent a change or event firing on the object.)

A potentially even more exciting bit of integrated logging is that about:loggest-server opens a tab that retrieves its contents from the server.  When run with the –loggest-web-debug flag, the server loads a module that cranks up the logging and does the same 1-second interval log reaping magic and exposes it for HTTP retrieval.  While this specific configuration with the high level of detailed logging is only appropriate for a developer-machine test server, it is incredibly valuable to be able to just pop open another tab and see what the server just got up to.

In any event, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to assume that I will take care of the bug now that it’s extremely clear what the problem is.  Well, extremely clear if I had taken a bigger screenshot of the conversation creation log.  Above the region captured is a header that indicates the actions are being triggered by the ‘convJoin’ task and the entry (which is visible) indicates the update_conv_data function likely kicked off the database activity.

PS: All the gibberish looking characters in the screenshots are crypto keys or other binary data that lack aliases mapping them to known objects.  Examples of successfully mapped aliases are the colored blocks.  In the case of the conversation creation gibberish, we are seeing the conversation id.  Those aliases are generated as a separate pass by the log reaper by walking the set of existing queries and using helper functions to map the items currently exposed by the queries to human names because it’s quick and easy and is O(what’s being looked at) not O(size of the database).  In the case of the conversation, there was no query against the conversation and I also have not written the helper function yet, which is why it did not get aliased.  Unit tests don’t have the problem because we create aliases for everything.

overview ownership/communication graphs for rich execution logs

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relationship-overview-spgm

My last blog post covered the fancy pants logging being used for the deuxdrop project.  To summarize:

  • we have loggers
  • they are organized by ownership hierarchy
  • they provide sufficient metadata that we can reconstruct the loggers that were talking to each other
This can result in a lot of loggers.  If you look at the log output from the last blog post (caution: BIG JSON file in standalone ArbPL instance) you might notice a list of loggers that looks something like the below, except not quite as sideways or shrunk:

last generation's logger hierarchy rotated sideways

Obviously, that much raw data is not super helpful.  So now we process the hierarchy, constructing graph nodes or aggregate graph nodes for things that are interesting in their own or in aggregate.  We use d3 of the vaunted protovis lineage to visualize the network and graphviz to lay it out.

d3 has a super-polished, fun-to-use interactive force-directed graph implementation, but graphviz’s circo layout produces better results.  Given that ArbPL already has a processing step for intake, it wasn’t too much extra work to include a step where we use the same JS code as on the client to generate a dot file, pass it to circo to lay it out, then extract the layout information and store it with the log data.  Many props to Gregoire Lejeune for his node-graphviz bindings that made it so easy to do.

overview-z-joined-notif-highlighted

Although the overview graph on its own is neat, it becomes useful by showing us the involved loggers/actors in a test step by highlighting them.  It does this by listening for wmsy‘s focus change events to know what the focused test step is.  (Since mouse interaction also causes toggling, it’s easiest to appreciate the process by using the up/down arrow keys to change focus without expanding the steps.  And if you want to toggle the expanded state without involving the mouse, you can hit the enter key.)

z-joined-step-callout-causes-highlighting

For reference, the steps look like the above, and the highlighted one has the ever-so-fashionable glowing fancy focus ring.

If you would like to see this for yourself, you can check out the archived (and therefore less likely to break) standalone version of the example log file: https://clicky.visophyte.org/examples/arbpl-loggest/20110720/.  The previously super-huge JSON file is now about an order-of-magnitude smaller because I started eliding large strings that are of no human interest.

new adventures in rich (execution) logs for debugging and program understanding

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Understanding what is going on inside software can be very hard, even for the developers most familiar with the software.  During my time working on Thunderbird I used a variety of techniques to try and peer inside: printf/dump/console.log, debuggers, execution analysis (dtrace, chronicle recorder, with object diffs, on timelines), logging (log4j style, with  timelines, with rich data, extra instrumentation and custom presentations, prettier and hooked up to dump on test failures), improving platform error reporting, gdb extensions, control-flow analysis of SQL queries (vanilla, augmented with systemtap perf probes), performance analysis (VProbes with custom UI, systemtap, crammed into the SpeedTracer UI, custom UI with the async work), chewing existing log facilities’ output (TB IMAP, gecko layout), and asynchronous operation causality reconstruction (systemtap, JS promises).

Logging with rich, structured data easily provided the most bang-for-the-buck because it:

  1. Provided the benefit of baked-in human meaning with some degree of semantic hierarchy.
  2. Was less likely to make wrong assumptions about what data was relevant.  How many times have you had to go back to change what a printf is logging?
  3. Once sufficiently automated, required no activation energy, no extra steps, and everyone can see the results.
However, it still has numerous downsides/gotchas:
  1. Potential performance impact, especially with rich, structured data.
  2. If people don’t write log statements, you don’t get log entries.
  3. If an error propagates and no one catches it or otherwise says anything about it, your log trace stops dead.
  4. Lack of context can hide causation and leave you filtering through tons of entries trying to reconstruct what happened from shadows on the cave wall.

 

As a result, when I recently started on a new project (implemented in JS), I tried to make sure to bake logging into the system from the ground up:
  • The core classes, abstractions, and APIs generate log entries automatically so developers don’t need to fill their code with boilerplate.
  • Loggers are built around object ownership hierarchies/life-cycles to provide context and the ability to filter.  This is in contrast to log4j style logging which is usually organized around code module hierarchies, noting that log4j does provide nested diagnostic contexts.
  • The test framework is designed around writing tests in terms of expectations around the loggers.  This helps ensure interesting things get logged.  It also improves the quality of the tests by making it easier to ensure the tests are really doing what you think they are doing.
  • Logger definitions explicitly name the log events they will generate and their semantic type, some of which have special handling.  The currently supported types are: state changes, latched states, events, asynchronous jobs (with separate begin and end entries), calls (which wrap a function call, catching exceptions), and errors.  This allows specialized processing and better automated analysis without having to try and reverse engineer the meaning using regular expressions.
  • Performance is addressed by instantiating different logger classes based on needs.  For modules not under test (or without logging desired), everything turns into no-ops except for events and errors which are counted for reporting to a time-series database for system health/performance/etc analysis.  The decision making process happens at runtime and is able to see the parent logger, so heavy-weight logging can be used on a statistical sampling basis or only for specific users experiencing problems/etc.
  • Loggers can give themselves complex semantic names that can be used to reconstruct relationships between loggers when the ownership hierarchy is not available or not appropriate.  For example, we can link both sides of the connection between a client and a server by having the loggers make sure to name themselves and the other side.
  • Simple wrapper helpers exist that make it easy to wrap a function so that a custom log entry is generated and it “holds” the call in limbo from whence it can later be “released”.  This allows unit tests to break complicated behaviour into discrete steps that humans can understand.  Far better to look at one thing at a time than eight things all jumbled together (or filtered back down to one, potentially hiding important details).

 

In any event, as one might surmise from the screenshots, this is more than a dream, it’s a pastel colored reality.

What are the screenshots showing?

  1. The logger hierarchy.  The colored bits are “named things”.  The test framework has the concept of things, actors, and loggers.  Each actor corresponds to exactly one logger and is the object on which tests specify their expectations.  Actors can be owned by other actors, resulting in a hierarchy we call a family.  Each family gets tagged with a distinct identifier that allows us to associate a color with them.  Things provide a human name to a (hopefully) unique string.  Things can be owned by actors and get tagged with the family name and so can be colorized.  In the logger hierarchy, the stuff to the right of the colon is the semantic name of the logger.  So “clientConn: A client to X longtermat endpoint blah” is really (under the hood) an array of strings where “A client” is actually the crypto key so named.  There are two colors because the connection is naming both its own identifying crypto key and the server’s crypto key it is trying to talk to.
  2. An example of the display of log entries.  Each logger gets its own column to display its entries in.  The header shows the name of the logger and is colored based on that logger’s family.  The colors were not shown in the logger hierarchy because I think it would end up too busy.  Each entry is timestamped with the number of milliseconds since the start of the test.  The event names are arbitrarily in blue to help delineate them from other semantic classes.  For example, “handleMsg” is a call-type.  The “obj” bits with the dotted stuff under it means something we can click on to see more of.  The events being shown are part of a CurveCP-style connection establishment.
  3. Similar to the previous screenshot, but here you can see named thing resolution in play with arguments that are strings.
  4. And if we click on one of those “obj” bits, we get a nice nested table display of the object.  As you can see from the pretty colors, named thing resolution is also in play.  You can also see crypto keys I did not name and which accordingly look like gibberish.  It is probably worth noting that some developer participation is required to make sure to put toJSON() implementations on all the complex objects that are exposed to the logger to make sure we don’t try and serialize huge swathes of object graph.  While this is a “don’t break the system” requirement, it also makes it easy to expose the useful bits of information for debugging.

If you would like to see the actual log display UI for yourself on the log from the screenshots (and can stomach it fetching 2+ MiB of compressed JSON), you can see it at https://clicky.visophyte.org/examples/arbpl-loggest/20110712/.  While the logs normally live on the ArbitraryPushlog (ArbPL) server, links to it are currently not stable because its all-in-one hbase datastore keeps self-destructing.  I baked ArbPL into a standalone form that lives at that URL and so should ideally not break so much.  Fingers-crossed.