Amazon CloudWatch Logs

Why

Suppose we have all kinds of pipelines written in different languages, using different tools, and located in different places. It would be frustrating to pull out the logs.

This is why we need a centralized log service, for example cloudwatch.

Sending logs to CloudWatch

First of all, send your logs to awslogs. The easies way is to use boto.

Retrieving and Analyzing Logs

With the logs sent to cloudwatch, we then could read out the logs using the following command:

awslogs get etl-tools --start='1d ago' --timestamp --output text | grep error

This will print out the logs 1 day ago. Read the awslogs documentation for more information.

FAQ

How to print out the neighouring lines

The following command will print out 10 lines before and 10 lines after this line with error.

awslogs get etl-tools --start='1d ago' --timestamp --output text | grep -10 error

The following command will only print out the 10 lines after this error line.

awslogs get etl-tools --start='1d ago' --timestamp --output text | grep -A 10 error

Similarly, the following command will print out the 10 lines before this error line.

awslogs get etl-tools --start='1d ago' --timestamp --output text | grep -B 10 error

Oh, too many logs

Dump the relavent logs into a file

awslogs get etl-tools --start='1d ago' --timestamp --output text | grep error &> error.log

Then read out the file using whatever text editor you like to locate the problem.