Rust Observability Experiment

This is an experiment in communicating log events (from tracing) over websockets, from an app to a viewer.

This is a just a prototype, and not ready for production.

Testing it

cargo run --release -p example_app

You should get a browser showing this (you may need to refresh):

Architecture

• The logger connects to a pub_sub_server with using web-sockets, and sends all log events as they come.
• The viewer connects to the same pub_sub_server (using the same web-socket protocol) and displays the events.
• The pub_sub_server forwards, records and replays the log events.

The viewer is either a native app (cargo run --release viewer) or a web app (./viewer/build_web.sh). The viewer web app can be served usiong web_server.

The logger is a library, and should work for web apps too (i.e. for apps compiled to WASM that runs in the browser).

There is an example_app that uses tracing for logging, sending it to a pub_sub_server on 126.0.0.1:9002. example_app also by default starts the pub_sub_server and the web_server so you don't need to run those seperatedly.

Future work

So much!

• The logger could store log events until it connects to the pub_sub_server.
• The logger should retry the connection to the pub_sub_server.
• The logger could log to disk, and the viewer read from disk.
• The pub_sub_server could persist data on disk.
• It would be nice if the pub_sub_server also served the viewer web app so a separate web server wasn't needed.
• The viewer could be improved a lot
  • Retry web-socket connection
  • Better log message visualization