Timestamps in upstart logs

Question

I'm using upstart on Ubuntu to manage services. It writes to /var/log/upstart/<service>.log. Errors in this file don't have timestamps, which makes it difficult to diagnose problems.

Is there a way -- a stanza of some kind in the config file -- to tell upstart to write timestamps with its log output?

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 29 '15 at 17:23

4

You can try using annotate-output shell script from the devscripts package:

Source code here.

answered Mar 29 '15 at 17:23

Udi

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 23 '13 at 23:52

0

There may be a much more elegant way to do what you want, but I've found the following ghetto method to be sufficiently effective :

           echo "`date` : Doing the next thing..."

answered Sep 23 '13 at 23:52

dampier

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score -1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 02 '17 at 05:52

Your service should maintain the dates/timing... The logs which appear in the logs under /var/log/upstart/ are the output of your upstart script .

Also you can add a pre-start and a pre-stop section into your conf file, to print the time before the service is ran and the timing after the service has stopped:

pre-start script
    echo "[`date`] <YOUR SERVICE NAME> Starting" >> /var/log/<YOUR SERVICE NAME>.log
end script

pre-stop script
    echo "[`date`] <YOUR SERVICE NAME> Stopping" >> /var/log/<YOUR SERVICE NAME>.log
end script

Timestamps in upstart logs

3 Answers3