New HTTP Logger Grails plugin

I’ve wrote a new Grails plugin – httplogger. It logs: request information (url, headers, cookies, method, body), grails dispatch information (controller, action, parameters), response information (elapsed time and body). It is mostly useful for logging your REST traffic. Full HTTP web pages can be huge to log and generally waste your space. I suggest to map all of your REST controllers with the same path in UrlMappings, e.g. /rest/ and configure this plugin with this path. Here is some simple output just to give you a taste of it. 17:16:00,331 INFO filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter - 17:16:00,340 INFO filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter - 17:16:00,342 INFO filters.LogGrailsUrlsInfoFilter - 17:16:00,731 INFO filters.LogOutputResponseFilter - >> #1 returned 200, took 405 ms.17:16:00,745 INFO filters.LogOutputResponseFilter - >> #1 responded with '{count:0}' 17:18:55,799 INFO filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter - 17:18:55,799 INFO filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter - 17:18:55,800 INFO filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter - 17:18:55,801 INFO filters.LogOutputResponseFilter - >> #2 returned 404, took 3 ms.17:18:55,802 INFO filters.LogOutputResponseFilter - >> #2 responded with '' Official plugin information can be found on Grails plugins website here: http://grails.org/plugins/httplogger or you can browse code on github: TouK/grails-httplogger.

I’ve wrote a new Grails plugin – httplogger. It logs:

  • request information (url, headers, cookies, method, body),
  • grails dispatch information (controller, action, parameters),
  • response information (elapsed time and body).

It is mostly useful for logging your REST traffic. Full HTTP web pages can be huge to log and generally waste your space. I suggest to map all of your REST controllers with the same path in <span class="class">UrlMappings</span>, e.g. /rest/ and configure this plugin with this path.

Here is some simple output just to give you a taste of it.

17:16:00,331 INFO  filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter  - << #1 GET http://localhost:8080/riddle/rest/index?username=admin&search=foo<br />17:16:00,340 INFO  filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter  - << #1 headers Cookie: 'JSESSIONID=DF4EA5725AC4A4990281BD96963739B0; splashShown1.6=1', Accept-Language: 'en-US,en;q=0.8,pl;q=0.6', X-MyHeader: 'null'<br />17:16:00,342 INFO  filters.LogGrailsUrlsInfoFilter  - << #1 dispatched to rest/index with parsed params [username:[admin], search:[foo]].<br />17:16:00,731 INFO  filters.LogOutputResponseFilter  - >> #1 returned 200, took 405 ms.<br />17:16:00,745 INFO  filters.LogOutputResponseFilter  - >> #1 responded with '{count:0}'

17:18:55,799 INFO  filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter  - << #2 POST http://localhost:8080/riddle/rest/login<br />17:18:55,799 INFO  filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter  - << #2 headers Cookie: 'JSESSIONID=DF4EA5725AC4A4990281BD96963739B0; splashShown1.6=1', Accept-Language: 'en-US,en;q=0.8,pl;q=0.6', X-MyHeader: 'null'<br />17:18:55,800 INFO  filters.LogRawRequestInfoFilter  - << #2 body: 'username=admin&password=password'<br />17:18:55,801 INFO  filters.LogOutputResponseFilter  - >> #2 returned 404, took 3 ms.<br />17:18:55,802 INFO  filters.LogOutputResponseFilter  - >> #2 responded with ''

Official plugin information can be found on Grails plugins website here: http://grails.org/plugins/httplogger or you can browse code on github: TouK/grails-httplogger.

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Recently at storm-users

I've been reading through storm-users Google Group recently. This resolution was heavily inspired by Adam Kawa's post "Football zero, Apache Pig hero". Since I've encountered a lot of insightful and very interesting information I've decided to describe some of those in this post.

  • nimbus will work in HA mode - There's a pull request open for it already... but some recent work (distributing topology files via Bittorrent) will greatly simplify the implementation. Once the Bittorrent work is done we'll look at reworking the HA pull request. (storm’s pull request)

  • pig on storm - Pig on Trident would be a cool and welcome project. Join and groupBy have very clear semantics there, as those concepts exist directly in Trident. The extensions needed to Pig are the concept of incremental, persistent state across batches (mirroring those concepts in Trident). You can read a complete proposal.

  • implementing topologies in pure python with petrel looks like this:

class Bolt(storm.BasicBolt):
    def initialize(self, conf, context):
       ''' This method executed only once '''
        storm.log('initializing bolt')

    def process(self, tup):
       ''' This method executed every time a new tuple arrived '''       
       msg = tup.values[0]
       storm.log('Got tuple %s' %msg)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    Bolt().run()
  • Fliptop is happy with storm - see their presentation here

  • topology metrics in 0.9.0: The new metrics feature allows you to collect arbitrarily custom metrics over fixed windows. Those metrics are exported to a metrics stream that you can consume by implementing IMetricsConsumer and configure with Config.java#L473. Use TopologyContext#registerMetric to register new metrics.

  • storm vs flume - some users' point of view: I use Storm and Flume and find that they are better at different things - it really depends on your use case as to which one is better suited. First and foremost, they were originally designed to do different things: Flume is a reliable service for collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of data from source to destination (e.g. log data from many web servers to HDFS). Storm is more for real-time computation (e.g. streaming analytics) where you analyse data in flight and don't necessarily land it anywhere. Having said that, Storm is also fault-tolerant and can write to external data stores (e.g. HBase) and you can do real-time computation in Flume (using interceptors)

That's all for this day - however, I'll keep on reading through storm-users, so watch this space for more info on storm development.

I've been reading through storm-users Google Group recently. This resolution was heavily inspired by Adam Kawa's post "Football zero, Apache Pig hero". Since I've encountered a lot of insightful and very interesting information I've decided to describe some of those in this post.

  • nimbus will work in HA mode - There's a pull request open for it already... but some recent work (distributing topology files via Bittorrent) will greatly simplify the implementation. Once the Bittorrent work is done we'll look at reworking the HA pull request. (storm’s pull request)

  • pig on storm - Pig on Trident would be a cool and welcome project. Join and groupBy have very clear semantics there, as those concepts exist directly in Trident. The extensions needed to Pig are the concept of incremental, persistent state across batches (mirroring those concepts in Trident). You can read a complete proposal.

  • implementing topologies in pure python with petrel looks like this:

class Bolt(storm.BasicBolt):
    def initialize(self, conf, context):
       ''' This method executed only once '''
        storm.log('initializing bolt')

    def process(self, tup):
       ''' This method executed every time a new tuple arrived '''       
       msg = tup.values[0]
       storm.log('Got tuple %s' %msg)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    Bolt().run()
  • Fliptop is happy with storm - see their presentation here

  • topology metrics in 0.9.0: The new metrics feature allows you to collect arbitrarily custom metrics over fixed windows. Those metrics are exported to a metrics stream that you can consume by implementing IMetricsConsumer and configure with Config.java#L473. Use TopologyContext#registerMetric to register new metrics.

  • storm vs flume - some users' point of view: I use Storm and Flume and find that they are better at different things - it really depends on your use case as to which one is better suited. First and foremost, they were originally designed to do different things: Flume is a reliable service for collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of data from source to destination (e.g. log data from many web servers to HDFS). Storm is more for real-time computation (e.g. streaming analytics) where you analyse data in flight and don't necessarily land it anywhere. Having said that, Storm is also fault-tolerant and can write to external data stores (e.g. HBase) and you can do real-time computation in Flume (using interceptors)

That's all for this day - however, I'll keep on reading through storm-users, so watch this space for more info on storm development.