sourceThread MDC value not set by typed actors

[johanandren]

Mentioned by the docs but we don't seem to set it?

[johanandren]

Or it's built in now with Slf4J, so it should be %thread in the docs?

[patriknw]

I think %thread is the thread that makes the org.slf4j.Logger.info call. For classic that is not useful so there we add sourceThread in SlfjLogger:

MDC.put(mdcThreadAttributeName, logEvent.thread.getName)

PS. I was wrong about that all Akka mdc keys are prefixed with akka.

[johanandren]

So the typed docs should say %thread but then if you have a mixed system with typed and classic what do you do to not get confusing logs?

[patriknw]

When using Typed it's always a mix, since our internal logging is going over the eventBus. I guess we could add sourceThread from the ActorContext logging so that field is always set, apart from when slf4j is used directly outside of ActorContext

[patriknw]

Similar with akkaTimestamp

[aumann]

The missing akkaTimestamp is really unfortunate. Is there a workaround/logback configuration to get consistent log entries for a mixed system without losing precise timestamps for classic actors? With the current 'recommended' configuration all log entries from typed actors are without time stamp since upgrading to 2.6

[johanandren]

I'm not clear on how to configure the logger to handle the diff but the timestamp and source thread is already in the log events (and is correct) for typed.

Is it possible to fallback from one expression to another if the first yields empty string? Could we provide some adapter that adds the mdc keys from the logger events or the other way around?

[aumann]

I found a somewhat ugly method to workaround the issue (with logback PatternLayout)

Unfortunately, the simple (defaultValue based) solution does not work:

%X{akkaTimestamp:-%date{HH:mm:ss.SSS,UTC}UTC}

The problem with this approach is that the %date pattern is not evaluated this way.

The only approach I got working was a nested regex-replace:
%replace(%replace(%X{akkaTimestamp}xxx%date{HH:mm:ss.SSS,UTC}UTC){'(.+)xxx(.*)','$1'}){'xxx(.*)', '$1'}

This way the akkaTimestamp is preferred if present, and otherwise the fallback %date based pattern is used.

Unfortunately, this is not very readable anymore.

[johanandren]

Could we provide some intermediate event transformation component for logbook that uses the event values to add them as the old mdc attributes before the actual layout is applied?

[patriknw]

We decided to add the sourceThread to the MDC for Typed also, and ignore the akkaTimestamp.