Spring Boot: how to log to Kafka

Kafka is ideal for log aggregation, particularly for applications that use microservices and are distributed across multiple hosts.

This is an example Spring Boot application that uses Log4j2's Kafka appender to send JSON formatted log messages to a Kafka topic.

There is now a Logging path and an Audit path. The path is determined by the presense of an SLF4J "Audit" Marker.

This application runs for 10 seconds.

• LogMessageGenerator sends some log messages to a log Kafka topic that's defined in src/main/resources/log4j2.xml. Here's an example log message:

    {
      "timeMillis" : 1485736021946,
      "thread" : "pool-2-thread-1",
      "level" : "INFO",
      "loggerName" : "io.woolford.LogMessageGenerator",
      "message" : "Log message generated %n",
      "endOfBatch" : false,
      "loggerFqcn" : "org.apache.logging.slf4j.Log4jLogger",
      "threadId" : 17,
      "threadPriority" : 5
    }

• AuditMessageGenerator sends audit messages to an audit Kafka topic that is defined in src/main/resources/log4j2.xml. Here's an example log messages

    {
      "message" : "Audit Message Generated",
      "eventIndex": 1
      "eventTimestamp": 1485736021946,
    }

Here's a two-minute video that walks through the code:

And a couple 10 minute videos:

Docker

You can bring up a local Kafka cluster in Docker using the docker-compose.yml file in local

  docker-compose up

and

  docker-compose down --remove-orphans

To do

1. Inject spring properties for the kafka host names and kafka topic names
2. include the host name in the log message. Cannot be done in the pattern
3. Understand what behavior should be if Appender cannot reach the broker

Audit code

Audit code is isolated in the audit package because it was elaborated on more than was probably needed

Questions

Is the Kafka Appender production hardened for the various broker-down scenarios?