Use container labels in docker logging tags

Today I’ve created a docker swarm cluster and I wanted to send all docker logs to the AWS Cloudwatch Logs service.
Since I’m going to deploy the docker containers as stacks with services, I wanted to be able to have a cloudwatch stream
namd like this: stack/service/container/id.

Unfortunately looking at the docker documentation the tags available aren’t enough to have the service and stack name.

Solution

After trying different random values and getting a lot of:

starting container failed: failed to initialize logging driver: template: log-tag:1:2: executing "log-tag" at <.ServiceName>: can't evaluate field ServiceName in type *logger.Info

I’ve found the source file that contains the context that’s available in the go template docker is parsing,
here.

So after looking at the golang template docs I’ve been finally able to get what I wanted.

So to have a stream like this:

stack name/service name/container name/truncated container id

you need a log tag option like this:

{{if (index .ContainerLabels "com.docker.stack.namespace")}}{{index .ContainerLabels "com.docker.stack.namespace"}}/{{end}}{{if (index .ContainerLabels "com.docker.swarm.service.name")}}{{index .ContainerLabels "com.docker.swarm.service.name"}}/{{end}}{{.Name}}/{{.ID}}

You can set this globally setting your /etc/docker/daemon.json like this:

{
  "log-driver": "awslogs",
  "log-opts": {
    "awslogs-region": "us-west-1",
    "awslogs-group": "your-group-name-here",
    "tag": "{{if (index .ContainerLabels \"com.docker.stack.namespace\")}}{{index .ContainerLabels \"com.docker.stack.namespace\"}}/{{end}}{{if (index .ContainerLabels \"com.docker.swarm.service.name\")}}{{index .ContainerLabels \"com.docker.swarm.service.name\"}}/{{end}}{{.Name}}/{{.ID}}"
  }
}

Alessandro Tagliapietra

Use container labels in docker logging tags

Solution