Logging

Dgraph logs requests for queries and mutations, and also provides audit logging capabilities with a Dgraph enterprise license.

Dgraph’s log format comes from the glog library and is formatted as follows:

Lmmdd hh:mm:ss.uuuuuu threadid file:line] msg...

The fields shown above are defined as follows:

Log verbosity

To increase log verbosity, set the flag -v=3 (or -v=2) which will enable verbose logging for everything. You can set this flag on both Zero and Alpha nodes.

Request logging

Request logging, sometimes called query logging, lets you log queries and mutations. You can dynamically turn request logging on or off. To toggle request logging on, send the following GraphQL mutation to the /admin endpoint of an Alpha node (e.g. localhost:8080/admin):

mutation {
  config(input: {logDQLRequest: true}) {
    response {
      code
      message
    }
  }
}

Note this input flag was named logRequest until Dgraph version v23.

The response should look like the following:

{
  "data": {
    "config": {
      "response": {
        "code": "Success",
        "message": "Config updated successfully"
      }
    }
  },
  "extensions": {
    "tracing": {
      "version": 1,
      "startTime": "2020-12-07T14:53:28.240420495Z",
      "endTime": "2020-12-07T14:53:28.240569604Z",
      "duration": 149114
    }
  }
}

Also, the Alpha node will print the following INFO message to confirm that the mutation has been applied:

I1207 14:53:28.240516   20143 config.go:39] Got config update through GraphQL admin API

When enabling request logging this prints the requests that Dgraph Alpha receives from Ratel or other clients. In this case, the Alpha log will print something similar to:

I1201 13:06:26.686466   10905 server.go:908] Got a query: query:"{\n  query(func: allofterms(name@en, \"Marc Caro\")) {\n  uid\n  name@en\n  director.film\n  }\n}"  

As you can see, we got the query that Alpha received. To read it in the original DQL format just replace every \n with a new line, any \t with a tab character and \" with ":

{
  query(func: allofterms(name@en, "Marc Caro")) {
  uid
  name@en
  director.film
  }
}

Similarly, you can turn off request logging by setting logRequest to false in the /admin mutation.

mutation {
  config(input: {logRequest: false}) {
    response {
      code
      message
    }
  }
}

Audit logging (enterprise feature)

With a Dgraph enterprise license, you can enable audit logging so that all requests are tracked and available for use in security audits. To learn more, see Audit Logging.