Logs in the Render Dashboard
Want to stream logs to your observability provider?
View, search, and filter your service's runtime logs from its Logs page in the Render Dashboard:
With a Professional workspace or higher, the log explorer also shows HTTP request logs for web services.
Use any combination of text search and supported filters to narrow results:
Separately, you can view logs for any recent deploy or one-off job.
Render does not emit logs for static sites.
Inspecting a log line
Log lines in the explorer display the following information:
HTTP request logs display the request's HTTP method and status code instead of an instance ID.
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
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Level |
An icon representing the log level, such as Hover to view the log level as text. Supports the following values:
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Timestamp |
The time of day the log was generated, in your local time zone. Mouse over this value to view the full timestamp in local, UTC, and Unix formats. |
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Instance |
The identifier for the service instance that generated the log, surrounded by square brackets. Helpful for filtering logs for a scaled service, or for pinpointing an instance swap during a deploy. Click this value to add it as a search filter. HTTP request logs are aggregated at the service level (not the individual instance level), so they do not display this value. |
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Message |
The logged message. HTTP request logs instead display the details for the corresponding HTTP request, such as:
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Viewing line details
Click a log line to open its details pane:
From this pane, you can:
| Action | How to do it |
|---|---|
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Jump to the line's original position in the log explorer |
Click the "target" icon at the top of the pane. This icon is displayed only if log results are currently narrowed by a search string and/or filters. |
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Copy the line's unique URL |
Open the ••• menu at the top of the pane and click Copy log URL. You can share this URL with other workspace members to help you collaborate on debugging. |
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Open a Dashboard shell session |
Open the ••• menu at the top of the pane and click SSH into instance. Note that you can't SSH into an instance that is no longer running. |
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Add one of the line's details (instance ID, log level, etc.) as a filter |
Open the ••• menu next to the corresponding value and click Include in query. |
Log filters
When searching with the log explorer, you can filter results by the following (in addition to searching for an arbitrary string):
| Filter | Description |
|---|---|
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Time range / Live tail |
Limit results to a predefined range (such as Last 24 hours), specify a custom range, or select Live tail to view a live feed of recent logs. The default displayed range is Last hour. Specify a different range using the dropdown in the upper right of the log explorer. The maximum available range depends on your workspace's log retention period. |
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The log level. Specify in the search box. Supports the following values:
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The ID of the service instance that generated the log. Helpful for filtering logs for a scaled service, or for pinpointing an instance swap during a deploy. Specify in the search box. You can also click the instance ID for any log line to add it as a filter. |
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HTTP request logs only. The HTTP method of a particular request (such as Specify in the search box. |
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HTTP request logs only. The response code for a particular request (such as Specify in the search box. |
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HTTP request logs only. The destination domain of a particular request (such as Specify in the search box. |
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HTTP request logs only. The path of a particular request (such as Specify in the search box. |
Wildcards and regular expressions
The log explorer supports searching with wildcards and regular expressions.
To match any number of characters, use the wildcard token (*). To match against a regular expression, enclose your search in forward slashes (/). You can then use any metacharacters supported by the RE2 syntax.
You can use wildcards and regular expressions in search strings and in filters. See the table below for some useful examples.
| Search | Description |
|---|---|
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Returns logs that contain |
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Returns logs that contain |
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Returns logs that contain |
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Returns request logs with a |
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Returns request logs with a |
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Returns request logs with a path that starts with |
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| Returns request logs with a response time greater than one second. |
Keyboard shortcuts
The log explorer supports these keyboard shortcuts:
| Action | Shortcut |
|---|---|
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Focus search bar |
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Enable fullscreen |
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Exit fullscreen |
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Scroll (slow) |
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Scroll (fast) |
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Jump to top |
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Jump to bottom |
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Copy all currently displayed logs |
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Clear logs (live tail view only) |
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HTTP request logs
If you have a Professional workspace or higher, Render generates a log entry for each HTTP request to your team's web services from the public internet:
This helps you debug unexpected behavior for a request, in particular by tracing its execution via the requestID field.
HTTP request logs appear alongside application logs in the explorer, and they support additional filters (such as method and status_code).
Render does not generate request logs for HTTP requests sent from other services over your private network—only for requests sent to web services over the public internet.
Tracing with requestID and Rndr-Id
In each HTTP request log entry, the value of the requestID field uniquely identifies the associated request:
Render includes this same value in the Rndr-Id HTTP header—both in the request to your web service and in the response to the requesting client:
In your web service's code, you can extract this value from the header and include it in every log you generate for a given request. If you do, you can search for this ID in the log explorer to view the corresponding request's chronological log history.
On the client's side, here's what a Rndr-Id looks like in Chrome's Network panel:
By tracing each phase of the request lifecycle with one consistent ID, you can more quickly diagnose and debug issues in collaboration with the users who encounter them.
Logs for an individual deploy or job
View the logs for an individual deploy of your service from the service's Events page. Click the word Deploy in a timeline entry to open the log viewer:
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Similarly, you can view logs for the execution of a one-off job from the associated service's Jobs page.
Log limits
Retention period
Render's log retention period depends on your workspace's plan (see the pricing page):
| Workspace Plan | Retention Period |
|---|---|
| Hobby | 7 days |
| Professional | 14 days |
| Organization / Enterprise | 30 days |
Logs older than your current retention period are no longer available, even if you upgrade your plan to extend the period.
If you need to retain logs for a longer period, you can stream your logs to a syslog-compatible provider.
Rate limit
Render processes a maximum of 6,000 application-generated log lines per minute for each running instance of a service.
If an instance generates logs in excess of this limit, Render drops the excess log lines. Dropped log lines don't appear in the log explorer or in log streams.