Your log data is a treasure-trove of information about your application, but it can be overwhelming. This post will dig into several strategies for ex

Power tools for analyzing your Heroku logs

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2021-08-02 18:00:09

Your log data is a treasure-trove of information about your application, but it can be overwhelming. This post will dig into several strategies for extracting metrics and other helpful information from your logs. We’ll start with the basics of the heroku logs command, then we’ll dig into the real fun using a tool called Angle Grinder.

heroku logs on its own just prints the most recent logs from your app and then exits. Generally that’s not very useful. I almost always want the -t (or --tail) option to continually tail my logs. Additionally I usually want it scoped to a specific dyno process, so I’ll include -d router, -d web, or -d worker so I’m only seeing relevant logs.

Even with the -d filter, it’s usually way too much data to be useful, so I’ll want to filter it even more. This is where chaining with grep is useful.

This uses a “pipe” to send the output of heroku logs as input to the grep utility. Grep searches plain text data using regular expressions. We’re not using any regexp syntax in this example, but we certainly could.

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