Hello OFBiz Dev Members, Here I am sharing my notes on which I've been working through: opt-in structured (ECS - Elastic Common Schema) JSON logging on top of the existing log4j2.xml.
1. Today's OFBiz logs are plain text, so every downstream consumer needs its own regex/grok parser before the data is even queryable - that's the core problem this addresses. 2. Added a JSON appender to the existing framework/base/config/log4j2.xml, writing ECS (Elastic Common Schema) formatted lines to runtime/logs/ofbiz-json.log, alongside the current console/ofbiz.log/error.log output - nothing existing changes shape or content. 3. It's fully opt-in and off by default: a single json.logs.enabled=false switch in framework/base/config/debug.properties. Flip it to true and the default ./gradlew ofbiz command picks it up on its own - no extra flag to remember or document. 4. ECS was chosen as the default (and only bundled) schema because it's an industry standard that Elastic, Grafana, and most log shippers (Promtail, Fluent Bit, Filebeat) already understand out of the box, with no custom mapping needed. 5. log4j2.xml exposes a jsonLogTemplateUri placeholder (defaulting to the bundled ECS template), overridable via -Dofbiz.json.logs.template=classpath:your-template.json - so a Splunk/CloudWatch/anything-else template can live in a separate custom component and be swapped in with zero framework changes. 6. Every log line also carries requestId, visitId, and userLoginId (populated in ControlFilter via Log4j2's ThreadContext/MDC), so all lines from one HTTP request or one user visit can be pulled with a single query - correlation the current plain-text logs don't support at all. 7. JSON-over-file also fits containerized/Kubernetes deployments better than relying solely on local rolling text files, which assume persistent, non-ephemeral disk. 8. The whole thing lives inside the existing log4j2.xml behind a Select/SystemPropertyArbiter condition. 9. How to test it: Setup a local observability/ stack (Grafana + Loki + Promtail via docker-compose) to try this out end-to-end. I completed the first pass of the above notes. Here are the screenshots of watching the ofbiz logs generated in ECS/JSON format using Grafana + Loki + Promtail. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SJRqFKNT0dtJ5mBP2fsC7YSKY-BP97Wo/view?usp=drive_link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J6RlrjnQawFFwtu4YO8V2HzlbEJD5hZ-/view?usp=drive_link https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AKsdcGg-N1WL7k2uClUdilQoOu2P3MLL/view?usp=drive_link https://drive.google.com/file/d/181f5kSNwfCieA_z79Z2IEjw0O7PgIPWX/view?usp=drive_link Here are the reference documents that I considered: - Elastic Common Schema (ECS) spec: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecs/current/index.html - ECS field reference: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecs/current/ecs-field-reference.html - ECS GitHub repo: https://github.com/elastic/ecs - Log4j2 JsonTemplateLayout (the mechanism used here, includes the bundled ECS template): https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/manual/json-template-layout.html I will be sharing a PR soon for everyone's reference. Please let me know your thoughts on this feature. Thank you. -- Kind Regards, Ashish Vijaywargiya Vice President of Operations *HotWax Systems* *Enterprise open source experts* http://www.hotwaxsystems.com
