Flight recorder

Example on GitHub: flightrec

The flight recorder is an event collection tool that gathers various information about a working Tarantool instance, such as:

• logs
• metrics
• requests and responses

This information helps you investigate incidents related to crashing a Tarantool instance.

The flight recorder is disabled by default and can be enabled and configured for a specific Tarantool instance. To enable the flight recorder, set the flightrec.enabled configuration option to true.

 
flightrec:  enabled: true

After flightrec.enabled is set to true, the flight recorder starts collecting data in the flight recording file current.ttfr. This file is stored in the snapshot.dir directory. By default, the directory is var/lib/{{ instance_name }}/<file_name>.ttfr.

If the instance crashes and reboots, Tarantool rotates the flight recording: current.ttfr is renamed to <timestamp>.ttfr (for example, 20230411T050721.ttfr) and the new current.ttfr file is created for collecting data. In the case of correct shutdown (for example, using os.exit()), Tarantool continues writing to the existing current.ttfr file after restart.

When the flight recorder is enabled, you can set the options related to logging, metrics, and storing the request and response data.

The flightrec configuration might look as follows:

 
flightrec:  enabled: true  logs_size: 10485800  logs_log_level: 5  metrics_period: 240  metrics_interval: 0.5  requests_size: 10485780

In the example, the following options are set:

• flightrec.logs_size – a log storage size in bytes.
• flightrec.logs_log_level – a log_level.
• flightrec.metrics_period – the number of seconds to store metrics after the dump.
• flightrec.metrics_interval – the frequency of metrics dumps in seconds.
• flightrec.requests_size – a storage size for the request and response data in bytes.

Read more: Flight recorder configuration options.