Use Logit for GOV.UK
How GOV.UK use Logit
GOV.UK use Logit to provide our ELK Stack.
This is in line with The GDS Way guidance on logging.
If Logit is down
If there is a problem with Logit you should report it by following the instructions in the Reliability Engineering manual for reporting an incident.
If Logit’s data falls off a cliff
If there seems to be no recent data in Logit when there really should be, you can try “restarting” the logstash instance.
You can get an visual indication of logs sent by navigating to the “Settings” for an environment and then looking at the “Statistics”. If no logs are coming in, then this might indicate a restart is required.
Navigate to the Logit dashboard and select the “Settings” button next to the environment that is experiencing issues. Next select “Logstash Filters” in the left hand menu. The “Restart Logstash” button is in the “Danger Zone”.
When we experienced this on 04/03/2019, the Logstash logs for our Staging environment reported the following error repeatedly:
Exception: io.netty.util.internal.OutOfDirectMemoryError: failed to allocate 16777216 byte(s) of direct memory
If you don’t have Settings option, speak to your tech lead/lead developer who will hopefully be able to help.
Accessing Logit
You can access Logit by following the instructions in the Reliability Engineering manual.
Logit stores the last environment you visited in a session. If you open any direct links externally they will take you to this stack.
Adding your user to the right team
If you are unable to see any logs, please speak to a GOV.UK Logit administrator. This will normally be your Tech Lead.
Administration guide
Adding users to GOV.UK Stacks
If you cannot see the user in the user list, they need to first attempt to login via SSO to Logit. Only once they have attempted to login to Logit will their account be visible for you to then assign them to a team.
- Go to the main “Dashboard”
- Click “Manage Teams”, then “Team Settings” and then click the appropriate team.
- Scroll down until you see a list of users and for the particular user give them “Member” access
- Click “Apply Changes”
Updating Logstash configuration
At present there is no automated way to configure Logstash configuration.
- Click the “Settings” button next to the stack you wish to configure.
- Go to “Logstash Filters”
- Amend the configuration
- Click “Validate”
- If correctly validated, click “Apply”
We store our configuration in the govuk-saas-config repository. Any changes to the configuration should be stored in here, and they should be consistent across stacks.