Logging

The easiest way to check the logs of your pods is to use the Web Console. In the Administration perspective, select the Workloads / Pods menu, and click on any pod running in your cluster. The "Logs" tab will immediately show the current logs of your pod, which will give you a precise idea of the current status of your application.

Checking for logs individually quickly becomes cumbersome, particularly for large microservice applications with many individual components. In particular, Kubernetes can kill pods at any time depending on their runtime status and the current cluster conditions, which means that log messages of a particular pod can be lost at any time.

Given the nature of Kubernetes deployments, it is better to coalesce application logs using ElasticSearch and Kibana, two tools that have become the standard Cloud Native way to manage logs. ElasticSearch and Kibana are provided as standard OpenShift operators.

Using the web console:

Depending on the amount of RAM in your computer, this process should be faster or slower.

Once all the pods in the "openshift-logging" namespace are ready and running, you should be able to open the menu "applications" on the top-right of the OpenShift web console, and Kibana will open up in a new browser window. You can login to Kibana using the standard username and passwords provided by OpenShift Local at startup. You can define an index pattern and then customize your dashboard with graphs and tables.

Create a new project, deploy the registry.gitlab.com/akosma/linkedin-learning-simpleapi:latest container in it, and execute the "/unstable" path a few times. Then navigate in the OpenShift web console to the pod, and select the "Logs" tab. Click on the View in Kibana button and this will open the Kibana application with your application logs in it.