Beginner

Structured Logging Fundamentals

Convert a Node.js API's console.log calls to structured JSON logging with Pino, attach request-scoped context with child loggers, redact sensitive fields, and prepare your logs to correlate with distributed traces later in this roadmap.

~3h
0 / 7 steps
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Intro

Why console.log Stops Working

Every Node.js project starts with console.log("got here"). It works fine on one laptop with one request at a time. It stops working the moment you have more than one service, more than one instance of that service, or more than one concurrent request — because plain-text lines carry no machine-readable structure, so you can't filter by user, by request, or by severity without writing fragile regex.

In this project you'll take a small Express API and convert its logging to structured JSON using Pino, currently the fastest widely-used Node.js logging library (its own benchmarks show it consistently outperforming Winston and Bunyan). By the end, every log line will be a JSON object with a level, a timestamp, and contextual fields you can query.

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Install Pino and Replace console.log

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Log Levels and Child Loggers

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Redact Sensitive Fields

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Correlate Logs With Trace Context

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Secret Mission

Secret Mission: Ship Logs to Grafana Loki

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Wrap Up

Before You Go

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