Watching Logs

The dev logs command streams logs from Skipper pods running in your local Kubernetes cluster.

dev logs                           # All pods, current logs
dev logs -f                        # Stream continuously
dev logs -c controller             # Controller only
dev logs -c router --level=warn    # Router warnings and errors
dev logs --grep="trace_id=<id>"    # Filter by trace ID
dev logs --errors --since=5m       # Recent errors

See dev logs --help for all available flags including output formats and filtering options.

Local process logs

When running dev up, controller and router logs are written to tmp/logs/controller.jsonl and tmp/logs/router.jsonl as structured JSON. These files are truncated on each restart.

You can also pass --log-file, --log-file-level, and --log-file-format to any command to write logs to a file. When --log-file is set, logs go to both stderr and the file. Level and format default to the main --log-level and --log-format.

Log format

Skipper emits structured JSON logs by default. Each log line includes contextual fields that accumulate through the call chain. See Observability for details on log format, trace correlation, and the available Prometheus metrics.