Logging

To keep track of the history of interactions with BOMnipotent Server, every event potentially results in a log being written. These logs are printed to the standard output. If the server is running inside a docker container named “bomnipotent_server”, you can see the last 3 lines of logs by calling

docker logs bomnipotent_server -n 3
​
2025-03-08 09:16:10 +00:00 [INFO] Database is ready.
2025-03-08 09:16:15 +00:00 [DEBUG] Header X-Auth-Email was not found in request
2025-03-08 09:16:15 +00:00 [DEBUG] Received healthcheck request from 127.0.0.1

The logs have the format “Date, Time, Timezone, Log Level, Message”.

The relevant section of your config file to manipulate logging looks like this:

[log] # This section is optional
level = "info" # This is the default severity level

The logs do not contain confidential information. For example, the notification about the database connection obfuscates username and password:

​
2025-03-08 09:16:10 +00:00 [INFO] Creating connection pool for database: postgres://[user]:[password]@database:5432/bomnipotent_db

Severity Level

BOMnipotent Server supports five log levels:

Each severity level includes the log messages from the previous ones. The default severity level is “info”, meaning it prints log messages with severities “error”, “warn” and “info”.

Error

An error indicates that an operation has to be aborted. Either the user input or the configuration has to change for it to work, and it needs to be triggered again.

Common examples include:

  • A requested resource is not found.
  • The user does not have sufficient permissions.
  • The configuration file cannot be loaded.

Warn

A warning is displayed when some input or configuration is suboptimal. The operation is still completed, but you or the user are urged to change either input or configuration.

Common examples include:

  • A temporary admin is configured.
  • A document without TLP classification is requested, but no default-tlp has been configured.
  • You have not updated BOMnipotent for over a year.

Info

This is the default severity level for logs.

Logs with level info indicate regular events that are important, but rare enough to not overwhelm the output.

Common examples include:

  • A request was made to an endpoint (although some endpoints like /health log with a lower severity than info).
  • A user was authenticated.
  • The config file has successfully been reloaded.

Debug

Configure debug log severity level to find errors in the configuration or user input. These logs help to understand, step by step, what the program does, and where something may go wrong.

Common exmples include:

  • Responses sent to the client.
  • Interactions with the database.
  • The contents of a succesfully reloaded config file.

Trace

As the lowest possible severity level, trace logs contain a lot of output. In contrast to the debug level, the trace level is meant to assist in finding errors in BOMnipotent itself. It is thus unlikely that you will ever need to configure this level, because it is mainly targeted at the developer. Common examples include:

  • The body of a request (truncated after 1000 characters).
  • The filters applied to a database request.
  • The server received a file event because someone interacted with the config file (or any adjacent file).