However, itвЂ™s a cheap and straightforward strategy to help you get started. Using a syslog server might not be the first option you think of when you think about collecting container logs. YouвЂ™ll notice, though, thereвЂ™s going to be a missing piece once logs are there-IвЂ™ll come back to this later. There are many ways you can process and retain Docker container logs. We need a better way to collect container logs, so we donвЂ™t lose them when the container stops-containers come and go all the time. This command only works while the container is running. However, if the container goes away, you canвЂ™t read its logs anymore using the logs command. ThatвЂ™s initially good because you can read the logs from a container. See below for an example of the commands youвЂ™d usually run: $ docker psД¬ONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMESДЈ40461436e07 busybox '/bin/sh -c 'i=0 whвЂ¦' 7 seconds ago Up 7 seconds fervent_shtern Then, you can read the logs with the docker logs CONTAINER, and you can add the -f flag to see logs live. If you want to read the logs from that container, you need either the name or the ID of the container. docker run -d busybox /bin/sh -c 'i=0 while true do echo '$i: $(date)' i=$((i+1)) sleep 1 done' The following command runs a container that simply prints a text indefinitely. Reading Logs From a ContainerДocker comes with a native command, docker logs, to read logs from a container.

Then, IвЂ™ll show you how you can integrate syslog and Docker to improve your troubleshooting strategy through logs. In this post, IвЂ™ll provide a quick overview of why having a syslog server might be a good option.

Also, if the container has gone away, we can read the logs collected while it was running. We need to have a centralized location for our logs to have a better context of the problem. However, we live in a world where we wonвЂ™t have only one container running, and our systems have multiple dependencies.

Docker syslog servers