monad-logger-aeson

Synopsis

monad-logger-aeson provides structured JSON logging using monad-logger’s interface. Specifically, it is intended to be a (largely) drop-in replacement for monad-logger’s Control.Monad.Logger.CallStack module.

For additional detail on the library, please see the Haddocks, the announcement blog post, and the remainder of this README.

Crash course

Assuming we have the following monad-logger-based code:

{-# LANGUAGE BlockArguments #-}
{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
module Main
  ( main
  ) where

import Control.Monad.Logger.CallStack
import Data.Text (pack)

doStuff :: (MonadLogger m) => Int -> m ()
doStuff x = do
  logDebug $ "Doing stuff: x=" <> pack (show x)

main :: IO ()
main = do
  runStdoutLoggingT do
    doStuff 42
    logInfo "Done"

We would get something like this log output:

[Debug] Doing stuff: x=42 @(main:Main app/readme-example.hs:12:3)
[Info] Done @(main:Main app/readme-example.hs:18:5)

We can change our import from this:

import Control.Monad.Logger.CallStack

To this:

import Control.Monad.Logger.Aeson

In changing the import, we’ll have one compiler error to address:

monad-logger-aeson/app/readme-example.hs:12:35: error:
    • Couldn't match expected type ‘Message’
                  with actual type ‘Data.Text.Internal.Text’
    • In the second argument of ‘(<>)’, namely ‘pack (show x)’
      In the second argument of ‘($)’, namely
        ‘"Doing stuff: x=" <> pack (show x)’
      In a stmt of a 'do' block:
        logDebug $ "Doing stuff: x=" <> pack (show x)
   |
12 |   logDebug $ "Doing stuff: x=" <> pack (show x)
   |

This indicates that we need to provide the logDebug call a Message rather than a Text value. This compiler error gives us a choice depending upon our current time constraints: we can either go ahead and convert this Text value to a “proper” Message by moving the metadata it encodes into structured data (i.e. a [Series] value, where Series is an aeson key and encoded value), or we can defer doing that for now by tacking on an empty [Series] value. We’ll opt for the former here:

logDebug $ "Doing stuff" :# ["x" .= x]

Note that the logInfo call did not give us a compiler error, as Message has an IsString instance.

Our log output now looks like this (formatted for readability here with jq):

{
  "time": "2022-05-15T20:52:15.5559417Z",
  "level": "debug",
  "location": {
    "package": "main",
    "module": "Main",
    "file": "app/readme-example.hs",
    "line": 11,
    "char": 3
  },
  "message": {
    "text": "Doing stuff",
    "meta": {
      "x": 42
    }
  }
}
{
  "time": "2022-05-15T20:52:15.5560448Z",
  "level": "info",
  "location": {
    "package": "main",
    "module": "Main",
    "file": "app/readme-example.hs",
    "line": 17,
    "char": 5
  },
  "message": {
    "text": "Done"
  }
}

Voilà! Now our Haskell code is using structured logging. Our logs are fit for parsing, ingestion into our log aggregation/analysis service of choice, etc.

Goals

The following goals have underpinned the development of monad-logger-aeson:

1. Structured logging must be easy to add to existing Haskell codebases
2. Structured logging should be performant

We believe we have achieved goal 1 by targeting monad-logger‘s MonadLogger/LoggingT interface. There are many interesting logging libraries to choose from in Haskell: monad-logger, di, logging-effect, katip, and so on. Both by comparing the reverse dependency list for monad-logger with the other logging libraries’ reverse dependency lists, and also consulting our personal experiences working on Haskell codebases, monad-logger would seem to be the most prevalent logging library in the wild. In developing our library as a (largely) drop-in replacement for monad-logger, we hope to empower Haskellers using this popular logging interface to add structured logging to their programs with minimal fuss.

We believe we have achieved goal 2 by directly representing in-flight Message values using a fixed aeson object Encoding, by never (internally) converting anything to intermediate Values, and by never parsing these in-flight log messages when assembling the final logged message. Regarding the latter point, we need to know the origin of an input LogStr (i.e. is it from monad-logger-aeson or not?). If we know an input LogStr came from monad-logger-aeson, then we know the LogStr is an aeson object Encoding of a Message, and so we can pass this encoding along untouched as a piece of the final log message’s encoding. If we know an input LogStr did not come from monad-logger-aeson, then we can scoop this LogStr up into a text-only Message, encode that, and pass the encoding along as a piece of the final log message’s encoding. A straightforward and relatively expensive implementation of determining a LogStr‘s origin would involve parsing of in-flight log messages back into Message values. Rather than resort to parsing every in-flight message, we simply check the first 9 characters of the LogStr for a match with {"text":". Yes, there is the possibility that a monad-logger user logs out a LogStr with this same prefix and that LogStr makes its way into a monad-logger-aeson user’s LoggingT runner function. This would cause monad-logger-aeson to erroneously assume the message’s origin is monad-logger-aeson. We feel this possibility is overall unlikely, and have accepted this as a tradeoff in the design space of the library. While we believe the principles described previously should provide good performance, please note that benchmarks do not yet exist for this library. Caveat emptor!