[Feature Request] Support showing timestamp in debug log

[jiasli]

Related command
--debug

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Currently, no timestamp is shown in the debug log. It is ok for GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps has they have their built-in timestamp for each line of output, but when an Azure CLI command is run locally, there is no timestamp in the debug log.

Timestamps can be helpful in troubleshooting long delays or profiling commands' performance.

Describe the solution you'd like
Add a config such as core.debug_show_timestamp to control whether timestamp is shown in the debug log.

Describe alternatives you've considered
Do this without a config, but only with an environment variable, such as AZURE_DEBUG_SHOW_TIMESTAMP.

Additional context

[yonzhan]

Thank you for opening this issue, we will look into it.

[jiasli]

On Linux, it is possible to leverage the ts command to timestamp the debug logs:

$ az version --debug 2>&1 | TZ=UTC0 ts '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%.SZ'
2024-04-19T05:08:02.137069Z DEBUG: cli.knack.cli: Command arguments: ['version', '--debug']
2024-04-19T05:08:02.137180Z DEBUG: cli.knack.cli: __init__ debug log:
2024-04-19T05:08:02.137194Z Cannot enable color.
2024-04-19T05:08:02.137200Z DEBUG: cli.knack.cli: Event: Cli.PreExecute []

See

• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26728/prepending-a-timestamp-to-each-line-of-output-from-a-command
• https://superuser.com/questions/1737989/ts-timestamp-input-utility-setting-time-zone-for-time-stamps
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/104088/why-does-tz-utc-8-produce-dates-that-are-utc8
• https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/TZ-Variable.html
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/545691/why-does-date-ignore-tz-environment-variable

[seanhoughton]

Microsoft support requests this type of information (correlation ID and timestamp) when diagnosing issues. I suggest reaching out to them to identify what additional information they need and include that in the debug output. Currently they ask for "Fiddler" captures which require downloading 3rd party software and learning a new tool. Instead, debugging problems should just require az-cli and Edge.

Additionally, login flows should launch Edge with --enable-logging to produce a capture of the login flow. I'll create a new issue about this if nobody else has.