Logging

This document gives an overview of logging provided by NGINX Ingress Controller.

NGINX Ingress Controller exposes the logs of the Ingress Controller process (the process that generates NGINX configuration and reloads NGINX to apply it) and NGINX access and error logs. All logs are sent to the standard output and error of the NGINX Ingress Controller process. To view the logs, you can execute the kubectl logs command for an Ingress Controller pod. For example:

kubectl logs <nginx-ingress-pod> -n nginx-ingress

NGINX Ingress Controller Process Logs

The NGINX Ingress Controller process logs are configured through the -log-level command-line argument of the NGINX Ingress Controller, which sets the log level. The default value is info. Other options include: trace, debug, info, warning, error and fatal. The value debug is useful for troubleshooting: you will be able to see how NGINX Ingress Controller gets updates from the Kubernetes API, generates NGINX configuration and reloads NGINX.

See also the doc about NGINX Ingress Controller command-line arguments.

NGINX Logs

The NGINX includes two logs:

• Access log, where NGINX writes information about client requests in the access log right after the request is processed. The access log is configured via the logging-related ConfigMap keys:

  • log-format for HTTP and HTTPS traffic.

  • stream-log-format for TCP, UDP, and TLS Passthrough traffic.

    Additionally, you can disable access logging with the access-log-off ConfigMap key.

• Error log, where NGINX writes information about encountered issues of different severity levels. It is configured via the error-log-level ConfigMap key. To enable debug logging, set the level to debug and also set the -nginx-debug command-line argument, so that NGINX is started with the debug binary nginx-debug.

See also the doc about NGINX logs from NGINX Admin guide.