---
title: "Logging"
id: logging
slug: "/logging"
description: "Logging is crucial for monitoring and debugging LLM applications during development as well as in production. Haystack provides different logging solutions out of the box to get you started quickly, depending on your use case."
---

import ClickableImage from "@site/src/components/ClickableImage";

# Logging

Logging is crucial for monitoring and debugging LLM applications during development as well as in production. Haystack provides different logging solutions out of the box to get you started quickly, depending on your use case.

## Standard Library Logging (default)

Haystack logs through Python’s standard library. This gives you full flexibility and customizability to adjust the log format according to your needs.

### Changing the Log Level

By default, Haystack's logging level is set to `WARNING`. To display more information, you can change it to `INFO`. This way, not only warnings but also information messages are displayed in the console output.

To change the logging level to `INFO`, run:

```python
import logging

logging.basicConfig(format="%(levelname)s - %(name)s -  %(message)s", level=logging.WARNING)
logging.getLogger("haystack").setLevel(logging.INFO)
```

#### Further Configuration

See [Python’s documentation on logging](https://docs.python.org/3/howto/logging.html) for more advanced configuration.

## Real-Time Pipeline Logging

Use Haystack's [`LoggingTracer`](https://github.com/deepset-ai/haystack/blob/main/haystack/tracing/logging_tracer.py) logs to inspect the data that's flowing through your pipeline in real-time.

This feature is particularly helpful during experimentation and prototyping, as you don’t need to set up any tracing backend beforehand.

Here’s how you can enable this tracer. In this example, we are adding color tags (this is optional) to highlight the components' names and inputs:

```python
import logging
from haystack import tracing
from haystack.tracing.logging_tracer import LoggingTracer

logging.basicConfig(format="%(levelname)s - %(name)s -  %(message)s", level=logging.WARNING)
logging.getLogger("haystack").setLevel(logging.DEBUG)

tracing.tracer.is_content_tracing_enabled = True # to enable tracing/logging content (inputs/outputs)
tracing.enable_tracing(LoggingTracer(tags_color_strings={"haystack.component.input": "\x1b[1;31m", "haystack.component.name": "\x1b[1;34m"}))
```

Here’s what the resulting log would look like when a pipeline is run:

<ClickableImage src="/img/55c3d5c84282d726c95fb3350ec36be49a354edca8a6164f5dffdab7121cec58-image_2.png" alt="Console output showing Haystack pipeline execution with DEBUG level tracing logs including component names, types, and input/output specifications" />

## Structured Logging

Haystack leverages the [structlog library](https://www.structlog.org/en/stable/) to provide structured key-value logs. This provides additional metadata with each log message and is especially useful if you archive your logs with tools like [ELK](https://www.elastic.co/de/elastic-stack), [Grafana](https://grafana.com/oss/agent/?plcmt=footer), or [Datadog](https://www.datadoghq.com/).

If Haystack detects a [structlog installation](https://www.structlog.org/en/stable/) on your system, it will automatically switch to structlog for logging.

### Console Rendering

To make development a more pleasurable experience, Haystack uses [structlog’s `ConsoleRender`](https://www.structlog.org/en/stable/console-output.html) by default to render structured logs as a nicely aligned and colorful output:

<ClickableImage src="/img/e49a1f2-Screenshot_2024-02-27_at_16.13.51.png" alt="Python code snippet demonstrating basic logging setup with getLogger and a warning level log message output" />

:::tip Rich Formatting

Install [_rich_](https://rich.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html) to beautify your logs even more!
:::

### JSON Rendering

We recommend JSON logging when deploying Haystack to production. Haystack will automatically switch to JSON format if it detects no interactive terminal session. If you want to enforce JSON logging:

- Run Haystack with the environment variable `HAYSTACK_LOGGING_USE_JSON` set to `true`.
- Or, use Python to tell Haystack to log as JSON:

  ```python
  import haystack.logging

  haystack.logging.configure_logging(use_json=True)
  ```

<ClickableImage src="/img/bff93d4-Screenshot_2024-02-27_at_16.15.35.png" alt="Python code snippet showing structured JSON logging configuration with example JSON formatted log output including event, level, and timestamp fields" />

### Disabling Structured Logging

To disable structured logging despite an existing installation of structlog, set the environment variable `HAYSTACK_LOGGING_IGNORE_STRUCTLOG_ENV_VAR` to `true` when running Haystack.
