Publish logs to Elasticsearch

The WebLogic Logging Exporter adds a log event handler to WebLogic Server. WebLogic Server logs can be pushed to Elasticsearch in Kubernetes directly by using the Elasticsearch REST API. For more details, refer to the WebLogic Logging Exporter project.

This sample shows you how to publish WebLogic Server logs to Elasticsearch and view them in Kibana. For publishing operator logs, see this sample.

Prerequisites

This document assumes that you have already set up Elasticsearch and Kibana for logs collection. If you have not, please refer this document.

Download the WebLogic Logging Exporter binaries

The pre-built binaries are available on the WebLogic Logging Exporter Releases page.

Download:

These identifiers are used in the sample commands in this document.

  • soans: SOA domain namespace
  • soainfra: domainUID
  • soainfra-adminserver: Administration Server pod name

Copy the JAR files to the WebLogic domain home

Copy the weblogic-logging-exporter-0.1.1.jar and snakeyaml-1.23.jar files to the domain home directory in the Administration Server pod.

$ kubectl cp <file-to-copy> <namespace>/<Administration-Server-pod>:<domainhome>


$ kubectl cp snakeyaml-1.23.jar soans/soainfra-adminserver:/u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/soainfra/

$ kubectl cp weblogic-logging-exporter-0.1.1.jar soans/soainfra-adminserver:/u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/soainfra/

Add a startup class to the domain configuration

  1. Using the WebLogic Server Administration Console, in the left-side navigation pane, expand Environment, and then select Startup and Shutdown Classes.

  2. Add a new startup class. You may choose any descriptive name, however, the class name must be weblogic.logging.exporter.Startup.

  3. Target the startup class to each server from which you want to export logs.

You can verify this step by looking for the update in your config.xml file, which should look similar to the following example:

<startup-class>
  <name>weblogic-logging-exporter</name>
  <target>AdminServer,soa_cluster</target>
  <class-name>weblogic.logging.exporter.Startup</class-name>
</startup-class>

Update the WebLogic Server CLASSPATH

Copy the setDomainEnv.sh file from the pod to a local folder.

$ kubectl cp soans/soainfra-adminserver:/u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/soainfra/bin/setDomainEnv.sh .

Modify setDomainEnv.sh to update the server class path.

CLASSPATH=/u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/soainfra/weblogic-logging-exporter-0.1.1.jar:/u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/soainfra/snakeyaml-1.23.jar:${CLASSPATH}
export CLASSPATH

Copy back the modified setDomainEnv.sh file to the pod.

$ kubectl cp setDomainEnv.sh soans/soainfra-adminserver:/u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/soainfra/bin/setDomainEnv.sh

Create a configuration file for the WebLogic Logging Exporter

Create a file named WebLogicLoggingExporter.yaml. Specify the Elasticsearch server host and port number.

weblogicLoggingIndexName: wls
publishHost: elasticsearch.default.svc.cluster.local
publishPort: 9200
domainUID: soainfra
weblogicLoggingExporterEnabled: true
weblogicLoggingExporterSeverity: TRACE
weblogicLoggingExporterBulkSize: 1

Copy the WebLogicLoggingExporter.yaml file to the domain home directory in the WebLogic Administration Server pod.

$ kubectl cp WebLogicLoggingExporter.yaml soans/soainfra-adminserver:/u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/soainfra/config/

Restart all the servers in the domain

To restart the servers, stop and then start them using the following commands.

To stop the servers:

$ kubectl patch domain soainfra -n soans --type='json' -p='[{"op": "replace", "path": "/spec/serverStartPolicy", "value": "NEVER" }]'

To start the servers:

$ kubectl patch domain soainfra -n soans --type='json' -p='[{"op": "replace", "path": "/spec/serverStartPolicy", "value": "IF_NEEDED" }]'

After all the servers are restarted, in all the server logs, you will see the weblogic-logging-exporter class being called, as shown below.

======================= WebLogic Logging Exporter Startup class called                                                 
Reading configuration from file name: /u01/oracle/user_projects/domains/soainfra/config/WebLogicLoggingExporter.yaml   
Config{weblogicLoggingIndexName='wls', publishHost='domain.host.com', publishPort=9200, weblogicLoggingExporterSeverity='Notice', weblogicLoggingExporterBulkSize='2', enabled=true, weblogicLoggingExporterFilters=FilterConfig{expression='NOT(MSGID = 'BEA-000449')', servers=[]}], domainUID='soainfra'}

Create an index pattern in Kibana

Create an index pattern wls* in Kibana > Management. After the servers are started, you will see the log data in the Kibana dashboard.