Logback VS Bunyan

Java -> Logback, Log4j2, JDK (Java Util Logging), Slf4j, e.t.c.

This is a GitHub link to my demo app. It’s simple Spring Boot web app used to debugging various stuff. There are many ways to configure JSON logging in Spring Boot. I decided to use Logback because it is easy to configure and one of the most widely used logging library in the Java Community. To enable JSON logging we need to add below dependencies.

Logback(https://logback.qos.ch/) is another non-commercial Java logging framework. It labels itself as a successor to the previously discussed Log4j framework.

> Then apache decides to put new people on log4j, do a backward incompatible v2 design that nevertheless is worse than slf4j. Why?

slf4j itself isn't a logging framework. It's a facade to logging frameworks.

Simple Logging Facade for Java ( https://www.slf4j.org )

It needs a logging framework behind it - log4j, log4j2, logback, commons, JUL.

The question is "why do log4j2?"

Logback went from the log4j1.x path ( https://logback.qos.ch )

Log4j2 has a lot of features that weren't present when the project started ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log4j#Apache_Log4j_2 ).

There is a licensing difference between Logback (LGPL) and Log4jx (Apache Commons).

Also, I'd like you to pay attention to the log consumer. You see, when the E2E scenario fails, it's not always obvious why. Sometimes to understand the source of the problem you have to dig into containers' logs. Thankfully the log consumer allows us to forward a container's logs to any SLF4J logger instance. In this project, containers' logs are forwarded to regular text files (you can find the Logback configuration in the repository). Though it's much better to transfer logs to external logging facility (e.g. Kibana).

This shows that the MariaDB JDBC driver uses Logback as a logging framework. Although Logback is not affected by Log4Shell, it has a related vulnerability (of much lesser severity, no need to panic) fixed in version 1.2.8 and 1.3.0-alpha11. I checked the version used by the connector and found that it used 1.3.0-alpha10. Even though Logback is included as a test dependency in the MariaDB driver, I sent a pull request on GitHub to update it. I encourage you to do the same in any open-source project you find and that includes a vulnerable dependency.

Dependencing on the project, changing the logger might range from easy peasy to a multi-week task. I'm ready to bet that in many (most?) cases, it'd actually be quite easy, so let's explore how to do it, using Logback as the target (there aren't that many alternatives actually).

NodeJS -> Pino, Winston, Bunyan, Npmlog, e.t.c.

Bunyan is also another popular and fast JSON Node.js logging library. Just like Winston, it also supports logging into multiple transport options. Other features include a neat-printing CLI for logs, a log filter, serializers for rendering objects, snooping system, and the ability to support multiple runtime environments such as NW.js and WebPack. Bunyan enforces the JSON format for logs.

bunyan argues that logs should be structured and that JSON is a good format for that. It describes itself as a “simple and fast JSON logging library” and has all the features you would expect from a logging library, including serializers and support for different runtime environments including Node.js, Browserify and Webpack.

Suppose that after some time you decide that the winston logger library was not the best logger for your project and you want to use Bunyan, what do you do? You just need to create a BunyanLogger class that implements the ILogger interface and it is ready to be used by the UserService.

Bunyan: Another popular logging library that outputs in JSON by default.

bunyan

Are there more options? Absolutely: Bunyan, Pino, and others. It depends on what your particular logging needs are.

With the increasing number of requests and possibly errors, we needed a proper logging setup to debug and monitor the service. That’s why we chose bunyan to log insightful data in our application. These logs sit conveniently on our new logging pipeline running on EFK (or, Elasticsearch Fluentd Kibana) stack. While this deserves a separate blog post on its own, let’s take a brief look at how the logs travel from our application to the kibana dashboard.

Bunyan — Another feature-rich logging framework that outputs in JSON by default and provides a CLI tool for viewing your logs.