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Logging and tracing for SMS Gateway

Use the SMS Gateway log files to help diagnose problems in your deployment.

Configuring logging and tracing
Finding and viewing log files
Configuring log file viewing permissions
Setting the log file language
Setting the log file time zone

Configuring logging and tracing

Like other configuration, logging and tracing levels are configured as Docker environment variables, as described in Configuration environment variables for SMS Gateway.

The following Docker environment variables are used to configure the log and trace settings:

Table 1. Environment variables for configuring SMS Gateway logging and tracing
Environment variable	Default	Description
`ENABLE_TRANSCRIPTION_MESSAGES`	`false`	Set to `true` to enable transcription messages. For transcription messages to be logged, the `LOG_LEVEL` environment variable must also be set to `finest`. Note that when these messages are enabled, they are printed to the logs and might contain sensitive PHI, PII, and PCI DSS data.
`LATENCY_REPORTING_THRESHOLD`	`1000`	Threshold in milliseconds for reporting round-trip conversation latency.
`LOG_LEVEL`	`info`	The log level for SMS Gateway. Valid values from least information to most information are `off`, `fatal`, `severe`, `warning`, `info`, `fine`, `finest`, and `all`. Note that when set to `fine`, `finest`, or `all`, the logs might contain sensitive PHI, PII, and PCI DSS data.
`LOG_MAX_FILES`	`5`	The maximum number of log files, trace files, and exception summary log files. When this limit is reached, the oldest file is deleted and a new file is created. For example, when this variable is set to 5, SMS Gateway generates up to 5 message logs, 5 trace logs, and 5 exception summaries.
`LOG_MAX_FILE_SIZE`	`100`	The maximum size in megabytes (MB) that a log file can reach before a new file is created.
`WLP_SKIP_UMASK`	`false`	The server sets the log file permissions to deny access to other users. Set to `true` to give read access to other users.

Finding and viewing log files

The log files for the SMS Gateway container are in the /logs/ directory. This directory contains the messages.log file and verbose garbage collection logs, such as verbosegc.1.001.log. If the LOG_LEVEL is set to at least fine, the directory also contains the trace.log file, which contains additional details. If SMS Gateway encounters any exceptions, the exceptions are summarized based on the day that they occurred in log files in the ffdc subdirectory.

To copy the log files off of the container, run the following commands:

For Docker Engine:

docker cp vgw-sms-gateway:/logs/messages.log .
docker cp vgw-sms-gateway:/logs/trace.log .

For IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, where the namespace is default and the pod name is pod1:
```
kubectl cp default/pod1:logs .
```

Tip: Run the kubectl get pods command to find the pod name.

Configuring log file viewing permissions

During the Voice Gateway deployment, the server logs that are created don't give permissions to other users, -rw-r---. See Logging and tracing configuration.

If you want to create the server log files with read permissions for other users, you can set the WLP_SKIP_UMASK property in your deployment configuration file to true. This configuration allows the log file to be created with updated viewing permissions, -rw-r-r-.

WLP_SKIP_UMASK=true

Mounting a Docker volume for easier log collection

Instead of running docker cp commands to collect the logs from the container, you can mount a directory from the local file system to the container. The container writes the logs directly to the mounted directory, so you can view and collect the logs locally without needing to copy them from the containers each time.

To mount a local directory as a Docker volume, specify the directory mapping in host_directory:container_directory format on a volumes key in your docker-compose.yml file. In the following example, $PWD/logs/ denotes a logs directory in the current working directory, which is mounted to the logs directory in the container.

services:
  sms.gateway:
    ...
    volumes:
      - $PWD/logs/:/logs/

After you redeploy the container by running the docker-compose up command, the logs directory is created in the current working directory where the command is run. From there, the log files are created and updated.

Setting the log file language

If you want to read the log files in a language other than English, you can choose a different language by changing the locale in the containers by setting both of the following environment variables:

Table 3. Environment variables for locale and language
Environment variable	Default
LC_ALL	en_US.UTF-8
LANG	en_US.UTF-8

To learn more about locales and these variables, see Locale on the Ubuntu wiki.

For example, the following variables set the log file language to Spanish:

LC_ALL=es_ES.UTF-8
LANG=es_ES.UTF-8

You can choose from the following supported languages:

Table 4. Supported languages
Language	Character set value
Brazilian Portuguese	pt_BR.UTF-8
French	fr_FR.UTF-8
German	de_DE.UTF-8
Italian	it_IT.UTF-8
Japanese	ja_JP.UTF-8
Spanish	es_ES.UTF-8
Simplified Chinese	zh_CN.UTF-8
Traditional Chinese	zh_TW.UTF-8

Setting the log file time zone

You can change the time zone of the messages in the log file by configuring the time zone for the container. To configure the time zone, set the TZ environment variable to the corresponding zone name from the International Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Time Zone Database. For example, the following configuration sets the time zone to America/New_York.

TZ=America/New_York

For more information about the IANA time zones, see Time Zone Database.