Overview

There are two aspects to logging in Pode: Methods and Types.

• Methods define how log items should be recorded, such as to a file, terminal, or event viewer.
• Types define how items to log are transformed, and what should be supplied to the Method.

For example when you supply an Exception to Write-PodeErrorLog, this Exception is first supplied to Pode's inbuilt Error logging type. This type transforms any Exception (or Error Record) into a string which can then be supplied to the File logging method.

In Pode you can use File, Terminal, Event Viewer, or a Custom method. As well as Request, Error, or a Custom type.

This means you could write a logging method to output to an S3 bucket, Splunk, or any other logging platform.

Masking Values

When logging items Pode has support to mask sensitive information. This is supported in File and Terminal methods by default, but can also be supported in Custom methods via the Protect-PodeLogItem function.

Information to mask is determined using RegEx defined within the server.psd1 configuration file. You can supply multiple patterns, and even define what the mask is - the default being ********.

Note

Patterns are case-insensitive.

For example, to mask all password fields that could be logged you could use the following:

@{
    Server = @{
        Logging = @{
            Masking = @{
                Patterns = @('Password=\w+')
            }
        }
    }
}

This would turn:

Username, Password=Hunter, Email

into

Username, ********, Email

Instead of masking the whole value that matches, there is support for two RegEx groups:

• keep_before
• keep_after

Specifying either of these groups in your pattern will keep the original value in place rather than masking it.

For example, expanding on the above, to keep the Password= text you could use the following:

@{
    Server = @{
        Logging = @{
            Masking = @{
                Patterns = @('(?<keep_before>Password=)\w+')
            }
        }
    }
}

This would turn:

Username, Password=Hunter, Email

into

Username, Password=********, Email

To specify a custom mask, you can do this in the configuration file:

@{
    Server = @{
        Logging = @{
            Masking = @{
                Patterns = @('(?<keep_before>Password=)\w+')
                Mask = '--MASKED--'
            }
        }
    }
}

Batches

By default all log items are recorded one-by-one, but this can obviously become very slow if a lot of log items are being processed.

To help speed this up, you can specify a batch size on your logging method:

New-PodeLoggingMethod -Terminal -Batch 10 | Enable-PodeRequestLogging

Instead of writing logs one-by-one, the above will keep transformed log items in an array. Once the array matches the batch size of 10, all items will be sent to the method at once.

This means that the method's scriptblock will receive an array of items, rather than a single item.

You can also sent a -BatchTimeout value, in seconds, so that if your batch size it 10 but only 5 log items are added, then after the timeout value the logs items will be sent to your method.