Troubleshooting Storm worker logs

Context

Sometimes it can be difficult to really understand what is going on when setting up a new Storm topology/channel. In most cases, the first thing to do is watching the logs. We will see how it possible to increase Storm workers log verbosity to properly troubleshoot.

What to do

By default, when a topology is submitted to a Storm cluster, the logging configuration file loaded is named worker.xml. It can be found on at

Standalone

punchplatform-standalone-X.Y.Z/external/apache-storm-1.2.2/log4j2/worker.xml

Cluster mode (where [setups_root] is define in punchplatform-deployment.settings)

[setups_root]/apache-storm-1.2.2/log4j2/worker.xml

This file is shared across all running Storm topologies so we definitely do NOT want to modify it. The best approach to debug a topology is to use another logging file that we can modify to be as verbose as desired.

To do so, we provide a file called logback-topology.xml. It can be found at the following locations:

Standalone

punchplatform-standalone-X.Y.Z/external/punchplatform-operator-environment-dataanalytics-5.0.0/bin/log4j2-topology.xml

Cluster mode

[setups_root]/punchplatform-admin-node-4.0.0-SNAPSHOT/bin/logback-topology.xml 

The best way to see what is happening is to run your topology in foreground mode. The logback-topology.xml file will be used by defaut instead of worker.xml. On either standalone or cluster platform, let\'s run an example with apache:

$ cd $PUNCHPLATFORM_CONF_DIR
$ punchplatform-channel.sh --configure tenants/mytenant/etc/channel_config/apache_httpd_channel.json
$ punchplatform-topology.sh --start-foreground --topology tenants/mytenant/channels/apache_httpd/single_topology.json -m local

start-foreground topology 'single_topology.json'...
java -server -Xms128m -Xmx128m  -Dlogfile.name=mytenant_apache_httpd_single_ -Dpunchplatform.log.dir=/Users/gmfmi/punchplatform
/standalone/punchplatform-standalone-4.0.1-SNAPSHOT/logs -Dlogging.sensitivity=S3 -Dlog4j.configurationFile=/Users/gmfmi/
punchplatform/standalone/punchplatform-standalone-4.0.1-SNAPSHOT/bin/logback-topology.xml -Dpunchplatform.configurationFile
=/Users/gmfmi/punchplatform/standalone/punchplatform-standalone-4.0.1-SNAPSHOT/conf/punchplatform.properties -cp [jars]
com.thales.services.cloudomc.punchplatform.processor.cli.TopologyCli start  -m local -t single_topology.json

Now, you should see your topology\'s logs in this interactive terminal. To stop the topology, press Ctrl + C.

Increase verbosity

If you need to some logs from lower logging level, you can change logging value set in the logback-topology.xml file. For example, if you want to see TRACE logs from you Storm Spouts, update your settings this way:

<loggers>
    ...
    <logger name="com.thales.services.cloudomc.punchplatform.storm.spout" level="TRACE"/>
    ...
</loggers>

To get a detailed description of available loggers, see the logging configuration guide<LoggingConfiguration>{.interpreted-text role="ref"}.