8. Logging

One of HAProxy's strong points certainly lies is its precise logs. It probably
provides the finest level of information available for such a product, which is
very important for troubleshooting complex environments. Standard information
provided in logs include client ports, TCP/HTTP state timers, precise session
state at termination and precise termination cause, information about decisions
to direct traffic to a server, and of course the ability to capture arbitrary
headers.
 
In order to improve administrators reactivity, it offers a great transparency
about encountered problems, both internal and external, and it is possible to
send logs to different sources at the same time with different level filters :
 
  - global process-level logs (system errors, start/stop, etc..)
  - per-instance system and internal errors (lack of resource, bugs, ...)
  - per-instance external troubles (servers up/down, max connections)
  - per-instance activity (client connections), either at the establishment or
    at the termination.
  - per-request control of log-level, e.g.
        http-request set-log-level silent if sensitive_request
 
The ability to distribute different levels of logs to different log servers
allow several production teams to interact and to fix their problems as soon
as possible. For example, the system team might monitor system-wide errors,
while the application team might be monitoring the up/down for their servers in
real time, and the security team might analyze the activity logs with one hour
delay.