Logging and monitoring in Ruby on Rails - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Logging and Monitoring in Rails

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple Rails application that tracks user actions. To keep your app healthy and debug issues quickly, you need to set up logging and monitoring.

🎯 Goal: Learn how to create a basic log entry, configure log level, and display logs in the Rails console.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a log entry with a specific message

Set the log level to :info

Write a method that logs user actions

Print the log output to the console

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Logging helps developers track what happens in their applications. Monitoring logs is like checking a car's dashboard to see if everything is working well.

💼 Career

Understanding logging and monitoring is essential for DevOps roles to maintain application health and troubleshoot issues quickly.

1

Create a logger instance

Create a variable called logger and assign it a new Logger instance that writes to STDOUT.

Ruby on Rails

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use Logger.new(STDOUT) to create a logger that outputs to the console.

2

Set the log level to info

Set the logger variable's log level to Logger::INFO.

Ruby on Rails

require 'logger'
logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
# Set log level to info
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use logger.level = Logger::INFO to set the log level.

3

Write a method to log user actions

Define a method called log_user_action that takes a user and an action string, and uses logger.info to log the message: "User: #{user} performed: #{action}".

Ruby on Rails

require 'logger'
logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
logger.level = Logger::INFO

# Define log_user_action method
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Define a method with two parameters and call logger.info inside it.

4

Log a sample user action and display output

Call the log_user_action method with "Alice" as the user and "login" as the action. This should print the log message to the console.

Ruby on Rails

require 'logger'
logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)
logger.level = Logger::INFO

def log_user_action(user, action)
  logger.info("User: #{user} performed: #{action}")
end

# Call log_user_action with "Alice" and "login"
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call the method with the exact arguments to see the log output.