Re: [ADMIN] 9.5 new setting "cluster name" and logging

* Thomas Munro (thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com) wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 3:24 AM, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> > (x-posting to -hackers, more relevant audience)
> >
> > On 2016-01-29 22:19:45 -0800, Evan Rempel wrote:
> >> Now that there is a setting to give a cluster a "name", it would be nice to
> >> have an escape sequence in the log_line_prefix setting that could reference
> >> the cluster_name.
> >
> > I've argued[1][2] for this when cluster_name was introduced, but back
> > then I seemed to have been the only one arguing for it. Josh later
> > jumped that train.
> >
> > Given that we now had a number of people wishing for this, can we maybe
> > reconsider?
>
> +1
>
> I missed the part of this conversation that took place on -admin. I
> agree with Evan Rempel's post over there[1] that it's useful for
> syslog users, and that it's not ideal to have to hijack syslog_ident
> or explicitly copy the name into log_line_prefix.
>
> [1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/56C64017.7050303%40uvic.ca

I'm with Thomas on this and I disagree that the "csvlog bloat" argument
has merit. If we're worried about bloat in csv then we should provide a
way for users to control what goes into the csvlog, not argue that
something which is clearly useful be excluded.

There's already a patch out there for adding a way to control what goes
into csvlog and it probably wouldn't be too hard to update it. I know,
because I wrote it. I continue to feel that it would be useful to add
and that tools which need to deal with csvlogs should be updated to
handle being told what's in it, just like pgBadger does for our much
more complicated and painful regular log files. That would remove these
bars to moving forward with more flexibility in log_line_prefix and
csvlog output.

Thanks!

Stephen