Implementing Centralized Logging for Microservices

One of the biggest challenges with APIs is the fact that we rarely get actual feedback on what is happening in our service. We do our best to design our services in a way that our HTTP responses indicate the success or failure of each operation, but this is not always enough. The most concerning types of responses are those in the 5xx range, without any useful information behind them.

For this reason, we need to employ logging in our microservices application. Logging produces real-time information on the operations and events occurring in the service. Each log message helps us to understand the behavior of the application and aids with our investigations when things go wrong. So, the logs are the first line of defense against the ambiguous 5xx HTTP responses.

During development, logs help us to contextualize some of the issues that we face and give us, when implemented well, a play-by-play sequence of the functions being called...