An overview of Cloudflare’s logging pipeline

One of the roles of Cloudflare's Observability Platform team is managing the operation, improvement, and maintenance of our internal logging pipelines. These pipelines are used to ship debugging logs from every service across Cloudflare’s infrastructure into a centralised location, allowing our engineers to operate and debug their services in near real time. In this post, we’re going to go over what that looks like, how we achieve high availability, and how we meet our Service Level Objectives (SLOs) while shipping close to a million log lines per second.

Logging itself is a simple concept. Virtually every programmer has written a Hello, World! program at some point. Printing something to the console like that is logging, whether intentional or not.

Logging pipelines have been around since the beginning of computing itself. Starting with putting string lines in a file, or simply in memory, our industry quickly outgrew the concept of each machine in the network having its own logs. To centralise logging, and to provide scaling beyond a single machine, we invented protocols such as the BSD Syslog Protocol to provide a method for individual machines to send logs over the network to a collector, providing a single pane of glass Continue reading