--- title: "Drupal watchdog logs" date: "2024-02-14T06:18:38+00:00" summary: "Understand and analyze Drupal watchdog logs for effective monitoring and troubleshooting of your Drupal applications." image: type: "page" url: "/acquia-cloud-platform/drupal-watchdog-logs" id: "9a5a918a-61d8-4dd5-adf5-bd19b008e0cf" --- The _Drupal watchdog log_ (`drupal-watchdog.log`) records Drupal-related actions on your application. The watchdog log is recorded on your infrastructure if you have enabled the `syslog` module. For a list of the log files handled by Cloud Platform, including accessing these log files, log file retention, and their locations, see [About Cloud Platform logging](/acquia-cloud-platform/about-cloud-platform-logging "About Cloud Platform logging"). You can also review information about how to [stream Drupal watchdog log entries in real time](/acquia-cloud-platform/streaming-log-entries-real-time "Streaming log entries in real time") from your browser. Important * In Cloud Next, Drush commands run within SSH, Cloud Hooks, and Scheduled Jobs log Watchdog messages to stdout/stderr. These commands do not log such messages in the `drupal-watchdog` logs and do not send them to [Log Forwarding](/acquia-cloud-platform/log-forwarding-cloud-platform "Log forwarding in Cloud Platform") destinations. Ensure that any needed output is redirected to a log file in the `/shared` folder, and that Drupal's error reporting level is set to high so that these messages are not hidden. As a workaround, you must configure tasks to execute through HTTP request with the [HTTP Drush Wrapper](https://www.drupal.org/project/http_drush_wrapper) module. HTTP requests have an expiration of 10 minutes. * You should avoid setting or overriding Syslog identity in `settings.php` as an override will cause the `drupal-watchdog.log` to only log output for the default website and not for the additional multisites. The Cloud Platform interface will write to `drupal-watchdog.log` for all of your websites in a multisite architecture if you do not set or override Syslog identity. * After March 2019, Cloud Classic website requests are no longer logged to a single `drupal-watchdog.log`, and are instead aggregated on the infrastructure handling the request. * In Cloud Next, `drupal-watchdog.log` downloaded through the Cloud Platform user interface or API do not contain `page not found` messages. As a workaround, you can use one of the following: * [Drupal request logs](/acquia-cloud-platform/drupal-request-logs "Drupal request logs") * [Apache access logs](/acquia-cloud-platform/apache-access-logs "Apache access logs") * [Log forwarding service](/acquia-cloud-platform/log-forwarding-cloud-platform "Log forwarding in Cloud Platform") * [Dblog](https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/core/modules/dblog) module (Acquia does not recommend that you use this module in production environments.) * The maximum character limit for a single message in the `drupal-watchdog.log` file is 15384. If your message crosses this character limit, the system truncates the message. * Syslog suppresses large volumes of logs sent in a short span of time by using rate limiting. This prevents more than 1000 messages from being stored in 30 seconds by a single process. To store large volumes of messages in `drupal-watchdog.log`, Acquia recommends that you create summaries or digests of results rather than individual messages per action or activity. This affects both log files stored locally, logs available for download, and logs forwarded to an external service. * Acquia’s [log forwarding](/acquia-cloud-platform/log-forwarding-cloud-platform "Log forwarding in Cloud Platform") feature prepends information to the beginning of each line forwarded to an external service. For more information, see [File formats in forwarded log files](/acquia-cloud-platform/file-formats-forwarded-log-files "File formats in forwarded log files"). Parsing the log file -------------------- The following line is a representative example of the data written into your website’s Drupal watchdog log: Aug 18 21:22:01 10.0.0.1 alphabeta: https://www.example.com|1503091321| custom_module|151.0.0.1|https://example.com/documents||0||Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in views_join->build_join request_id="v-00000000-845b-0000-8178-22000ab832c9" Each of the items in the Drupal watchdog is noted in the following table, along with its description: Position Data Description 0 `Aug 18 21:22:01` The date and time of the request 1 `10.0.0.1` The internal hostname of the infrastructure handling this request. If no hostname exists, the internal IP address will be displayed. 2 `alphabeta` The internal Acquia website name this request is for 3 `http://www.example.com` The domain this request was for 4 `1503091321` The Unix timestamp of the request 5 `custom_module` The name of the module issuing this message 6 `151.0.0.1` The originating IP address of this request 7 `https://example.com/documents` The full URL of the requested page. 8 _(blank)_ The referrer for this request (the example line is blank for this value) 9 `0` The Drupal user ID initiating the request. `0` means an anonymous user 10 _(blank)_ A relevant link, if one was passed to the logging function 11 `Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in views_join->build_join` Message 12 `request_id="v-00000000-845b-0000-8178-22000ab832c9"` A unique ID attached to this request by the load balancer, which appears in several Cloud Platform log files. For more information, see [Using HTTP request IDs](/acquia-cloud-platform/develop-apps/drupal-apps/requestid) If you want to search for a website in `drupal-watchdog.log`, you can use any of the following commands, which allow you to search log entries for a specific domain name: * `grep`: Allows you to search uncompressed log files * `zgrep`: Allows you to search compressed log files ending in `.tar.gz` In Drupal 7, `drush vget syslog_format` displays information about the ordering and content of fields in the watchdog logs. API documentation about Drupal’s watchdog log is available for [Drupal 7](https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21bootstrap.inc/function/watchdog/7.x).