Introducing log attachments for enhanced diagnostics

Embrace’s new log attachments feature provides several added capabilities and benefits for engineers. These include:

Support for various types of file attachments: You can attach different types of files to a log record, such as PDFs, PNGs, JPGs, and JSON/binary files. Different types of files enrich your understanding of the application’s state when a log message is captured.  Data files of up to 1 MB in size are supported, and they can be attached to any log type that Embrace offers, including error, warning, and info/system logs. 

Support for downloading attachments: Engineers can download log attachment files directly from the logs page in the dashboard. The download link appears as a log property, allowing for a quick and easy way to identify log records that include attachments and to retrieve that file. 

Logs data enrichment: While logs are essential on their own, providing different mechanisms to enrich the data associated with a log record makes them significantly more valuable at providing insight. Log attachments are another means of enrichment to give added context into the application state and user experience when a log message was recorded. Given that this feature supports attaching images, among other file formats, the amount of context that can now be added is a huge improvement. 

Improved troubleshooting efficiency: Embrace’s logs page allows engineers to access comprehensive logs data in one place, providing both an aggregated and raw logs view. With the addition of log attachment files comes further filtering capabilities; you can now easily search through log records by isolating only the ones that have a file attachment, or even the ones where an error occurred in attaching the file. The combination of attachments and advanced filtering capabilities helps make logs even more useful by reducing the time spent hunting for specific records or combing through raw events hoping to get additional context. 

In addition to the main feature capabilities above, the logs attachment feature makes life easier for developers by providing: 

Non-blocking uploads: Even if there’s an interruption in the attachment upload when a log record is being created, it will not prevent the log record itself from being sent. In this way, log attachments never present a barrier to the essential functionality of logging — only enrichment. 

External hosting: As part of Embrace’s commitment to making our tools accessible to the community, the logs attachment feature is available via the open source SDK to non-customers. Non-customers can host files and attach a link to the file for all log types.

Interested in learning more about Embrace’s support for logs? Check out this blog outlining our full logs experience capabilities, including support for the Open telemetry data standard. Alternatively, head over to our docs site for more in-depth technical instructions on using logs with Embrace.