HAProxy is amazing piece of software. It is rock solid, extremely flexible and has been proven by many companies which depend on it.
I use haproxy as a load balancer and service discovery. It runs on each CoreOS node and proxies traffic through to healthy services running on CoreOS cluster inside docker containers. This post is not about how that works, but rather how to get haproxy log to syslog and in json.
HAProxy log contains a lot of useful information and can be very helpful when you’re trying to debug some issue with your applications. Say you’re pushing all your logs to ElasticSearch, so that they can be easily searchable from one place. I like when apps log in already structured format if possible, instead of relying on some central log pre-processor.
HAProxy has no native json log format support, but it allows you to define your
own log format. In haproxy.cfg global defaults section define custom,
json-like log-format, then in global haproxy.cfg section, tell it to log to
/dev/log, see full example below:
global
daemon
maxconn 4096
spread-checks 5
log /dev/log local0
defaults
mode tcp
log global
option log-health-checks
# make sure log-format is on a single line
log-format {"type":"haproxy","timestamp":%Ts,"http_status":%ST,"http_request":"%r","remote_addr":"%ci","bytes_read":%B,"upstream_addr":"%si","backend_name":"%b","retries":%rc,"bytes_uploaded":%U,"upstream_response_time":"%Tr","upstream_connect_time":"%Tc","session_duration":"%Tt","termination_state":"%ts"}A few things to note here is that haproxy does not allow you to define error log format, so error logs will be just in plain unstructured format.
Let me know if you’re interested how to get haproxy logs over the fence (outside docker container).