We developed and open-sourced this Log Monitor tool in 2019 to bridge the differences between how Windows applications often log information and how the container ecosystem works.
- 2019 Blog Post: Windows Containers Log Monitor Opensource Release - Microsoft Tech Community
- GitHub Repo: windows-container-tools/LogMonitor at main · microsoft/windows-container-tools (github.com)
Unlike Linux applications that log to STDOUT, Windows applications log to Windows log locations such as ETW, Event Log, and custom log files. Since many container ecosystem logging solutions are built to pull from the STDOUT pipeline as standard with Linux, Windows containers app logs historically have not been accessible via these solutions. The Log Monitor tool bridges this gap between Windows log locations and STDOUT.
Since then, our teams have been heads down bringing various features and capabilities to Windows containers in Kubernetes and lighting them up in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Based on the feedback and value customers have expressed about this tool, we've created a new team that will focus on not only evolving Log Monitor but developing other bridge tools that make it easier to containerize Windows applications. Our team has been actively triaging issues here: Issues · microsoft/windows-container-tools (github.com).
Today we are very happy to announce Log Monitor 1.2 Release! You can find the release at Release Log Monitor Version 1.2 · microsoft/windows-container-tools (github.com). It addresses some of the issues we've received and brings the following changes:
- Added UTF-8 encoding support for STDOUT stream
- Log Monitor will now pass through the exit code of any child process it spawns to caller
- Added x86 Build Support
- Added support for UTF-8 encoded Config Files
- Stability and Quality Improvements
- Replaced deprecated WinAPI methods
- Updated Windows SDK version
We are also evaluating the following features for future releases:
- Rotating log support
- Environment variable configuration support
- ConfigMap support
- Integrations with log aggregation services at scale
- Configuration updates during container runtime
- Performance
- Sidecar usage patterns
- Log driver support
- Telemetry
Please let us know if those are still priorities to help you leverage Windows containers to modernize on AKS or other Kubernetes based services. We would love to hear your input at the Issues tab: Issues · microsoft/windows-container-tools (github.com).
Lucille