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Container Logging

For the last six months, the Acme Anvil Corporation has been migrating some of their bare metal infrastructure to Docker containers. After the initial implementation, the team has decided to implement a better logging strategy by using a centralized syslog server. You have been tasked with configuring syslog on one of the Docker instances. Next, you will configure Docker to use syslog instead of the JSON file log. Finally, you will test the configuration by spinning up two containers to test logging with syslog and a JSON file.

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Path Info

Level

Intermediate

Duration

1h 0m

Last updated

Sep 01, 2025

Challenge

Configure syslog.
You will need to open rsyslog.conf and make a few changes:
```
vim /etc/rsyslog.conf
```
Uncomment the two UDP syslog receptions:
```
#$ModLoad imudp
#$UDPServerRun 514
```
to
```
$ModLoad imudp
$UDPServerRun 514
```

Challenge

Configure Docker to use syslog.

Create the daemon.json file.

mkdir /etc/docker
vim /etc/docker/daemon.json

Add the following content.

{
  "log-driver": "syslog",
  "log-opts": {
    "syslog-address": "udp://PRIVATE_IP:514"
  }
}

Challenge

Create a container using syslog.
Enable and start the Dockere service.
```
sudo systemctl enable docker
sudo systemctl start docker
```
Create a container called syslog-logging using the httpd image.
```
docker container run -d --name syslog-logging --log-driver none httpd
```
Challenge

Create a container using a JSON file.
Create a container that uses the JSON file for logging.
```
docker container run -d --name json-logging --log-driver json-file httpd
```
Challenge

Verify that the `syslog-logging` container is sending its logs to syslog.
Make sure that the syslog-logging container is logging to syslog by checking the message log file:
```
tail /var/log/messages
```
Challenge

Verify that the `json-logging` container is sending its logs to the JSON file.
Execute docker logs for the json-logging container.
```
docker logs json-logging
```

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Container Logging

Path Info

Table of Contents

Configure syslog.

Configure Docker to use syslog.

Create a container using syslog.

Create a container using a JSON file.

Verify that the `syslog-logging` container is sending its logs to syslog.

Verify that the `json-logging` container is sending its logs to the JSON file.

What's a lab?

Provided environment for hands-on practice

Guided walkthrough

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