Posit Connect: All Things Logs and Logging

Posit Connect gives data science teams the power to deploy, manage, monitor, and control access to their own applications, dashboards, scheduled reports, and web APIs. If you haven’t upgraded Connect yet this year, you’re missing out on updated tools for managing content – from inspecting logs to sending process termination requests. Connect administrators should know about our transition to structured logging and recent improvements to audited events data.

RStudio is now Posit
Our professional products have been renamed to Posit Connect, Posit Workbench, Posit Package Manager, Posit Cloud, and Posit Academy so it’s easier for folks to understand that we support more than just R.

Please review our Blog post/FAQ to answer commonly asked questions about the rebrand. For additional notes about how this change will impact Connect administrators, jump down to the Administrator Digest.

This post covers:

• An update from the July release about the content log viewer redesign
• Connect Server API endpoints for job (process) management
• More updates for publishers: Quarto and private R packages
• Information about the move to structured logging for Connect’s access, audit, and service logs
• Recent improvements to the information associated with audited events
• Notes for administrators about the rebranding change from RStudio Connect to Posit Connect
• Upgrade instructions for the November release

Content Log Viewer Update

A redesign of content logs in the Connect dashboard. Released in the 2022.07.0 edition.

New Look: Full-Width

The log viewer has moved.

Content logs used to be located in the Settings pane. The viewer is now accessed from the Connect dashboard (upper right) Toolbar menu by clicking the Show Logs icon. For smaller windows and mobile, this icon is consolidated into the More option.

The logs can also be opened and closed with a keyboard shortcut (~).

Currently running process logs are indicated by a green “live” symbol. The log currently shown in the viewer is indicated by a checkmark symbol.

Use the Logs Selection drop-down (located in the upper left) to view the available logs and switch between them in the viewer. Logs are organized by content bundle. Each time you publish an update to a content item, a new content bundle is created. The current bundle is denoted as “Active”.

Search and download functionality is scoped to the log file you currently have selected and displayed in the logs viewer. The viewer output may be truncated for log line length (at 4096 characters) and lines shown (at 5000 lines). Truncation prevents performance issues in the browser.

Did you know there are different types of logs to explore?

There are several types of logs available to filter depending on the type of content you are inspecting.

Documents published with source code will have environment restore logs and render logs. Applications will have environment restore logs and process logs. Use the filter to narrow the type of logs shown in the Logs Selection drop-down.

Connect Jobs API

New Connect Server API endpoints for managing content processes. Released in the 2022.10.0 edition.

• Endpoints for content process (job) enumeration, downloading a job log file, retrieving the primary error for a job, and sending a kill order request.
• All endpoints require an API key with content owner or collaborator access.
• See the Connect API documentation for more information.
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A few non-logging related updates for Publishers

Are you publishing Quarto projects on your Connect server yet?

Contact your Posit Connect administrator if Quarto support is not available. Information about setting up Quarto in Posit Connect is available in the Quarto chapter of the Admin Guide.

• New – Connect supports Quarto Project Profiles
• Cool – Add commenting to your Quarto projects
• Learn more about Connect’s Quarto feature support in the User Guide

Administrator Digest

A Move to Structured Logging

Starting in the 2022.11.0 edition, Connect no longer provides multiple logging implementation options.

Connect offers structured logging for access, audit, and service logs (including debug-based services), in multiple formats and output types, with built-in support for log severity levels. The logs for content published to Connect are not included in this structured logging update.

Structured logging has been enabled by default since the June 2022 edition. This change provides an opportunity to standardize log formatting and offers more configuration options than the previous basic logging implementation. Additionally, the log entries produced are better-suited for integrations with common log aggregation tools.

To learn about structured logging output types, formats, and configuration options, review the Connect Admin Guide section on Logging.

Migration Considerations

• Check Custom Parsing Rules Existing tooling that expects the old format may break. The new format is meant to work seamlessly with popular log aggregation tools, so fixing this is ideally a simple matter of removing any custom parsing rules.
• Check Output Locations The new logs are written to a different directory by default. You will need to configure any custom aggregation tools to point to the new location or configure Connect to continue writing to the old location. A full list of structured logging configuration options is provided in the Appendix.
• Check File Permissions The new log files are not world-readable by default. You may need to grant access to any existing tooling.

Improvements to Audited Events

Starting in the 2022.10.0 edition, each event captured in the audit log specifies the actor type in its log fields.

Audited actions in Connect can be triggered by a user or by the system, and each audited event now specifies the type of actor in its data record. Learn more in the updated Admin Guide.

Event records triggered by a user have `actor_id`, `actor_guid`, `actor_role` and `actor_description` data fields.

Events triggered by the system have fixed `actor_id` and `actor_role` fields with `0` and `system` as the values. The `actor_description` field provides more details about the system process related to the event.

These changes should make it easier to craft custom alerts in log aggregation tools. See a step-by-step example of Connect audit log alerting with DataDog.

Notes about the Posit Connect Rebrand

The scope of all rebrand-related changes to Connect has been limited to logos, brand colors, and text updates.

The product documentation has also received updates and will continue to evolve as product changes roll out.

There have been no changes to functional aspects of the product such as installer package names, the service name, default RunAs user, environment variables, the configuration file and default settings, and other files and directories created by Connect. As such, you will continue to see many references to RStudio and rstudio-connect remain throughout the Admin Guide. The documentation is intended to be followed as written, do not attempt to substitute “posit” for places where you see “rstudio” in the guide.

For questions or concerns about the rebrand, product changes, or your license agreement, please contact sales@posit.co or support@posit.co.

In case you missed it: Additional Recent Updates for Admins

New

• The Server Status Report tool will run a test to detect the use of deprecated settings in your configuration file.
• Configuration settings can now be set via environment variables.
• For programmatic provisioning, Connect supports the creation of an initial administrator user and API key.
• R is now optional. You can disable the R runtime requirement with the `R.Enabled` configuration setting.

Deprecated

• Hosting of TensorFlow Model APIs is deprecated and will be removed in an upcoming release. The `Server.TensorFlowEnabled` setting is now disabled by default. Use an API framework like Plumber, Flask, or FastAPI to create an HTTP API for your TensorFlow models.

Upgrade Posit Connect

Before upgrading, please review the full release notes.

Upgrading Posit Connect typically requires less than ten minutes. We recommend backing up Posit Connect’s databases and data directory before upgrading. If you need to roll back to a prior version, you will need these backups.

To perform an upgrade, download and run the installation script. The script installs a new version of Connect on top of the earlier one. Existing configuration settings are respected.
curl -Lo rsc-installer.sh https://cdn.rstudio.com/connect/installer/installer-v6.0.0.sh

sudo -E bash ./rsc-installer.sh 2022.11.0

Standard upgrade documentation can be found here.

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