(Awaiting Approval) Logging Options Overview

The Nextcloud Exchange Connector utilizes a robust, asynchronous logging framework based on Serilog. This system allows administrators to direct diagnostic data to multiple destinations simultaneously, making it highly adaptable to both Docker and Binary deployment architectures.

Rather than writing logs to a single location, the connector supports four distinct output methods. You can enable these individually or combine them based on your infrastructure needs.

Console Output

How it works: Logs are printed directly to the console.
Best used for: Initial setup verification and real-time monitoring.

Database Output

How it works: Logs are written directly into an automatically generated Logs table within your primary synchronization database.
Best used for: Single-instance setups where administrators prefer to query and filter logs using their existing database management tools (like pgAdmin or DBeaver).

Warning for Multi-Instance Deployments

Do not use Database logging if you are running a Multi-Instance architecture. As your organization scales, the sheer volume of log writing requests from multiple worker nodes can quickly overload and crash the database.

File System Output

How it works: Logs are saved as standard .txt files in a dedicated directory on the host machine. The application handles automatic file rotation, creating new files when a size limit is reached and deleting old files to conserve disk space.
Best used for: Long-term archival and environments with strict data retention policies.
Deployment fit: This is the highly recommended approach for Binary installations. The application will automatically generate the configured log folder directly inside each worker's root directory, keeping logs perfectly isolated per instance.

Grafana & Loki Output

How it works: Logs are pushed to Loki and visualized through a dedicated Grafana dashboard web interface.
Best used for: Advanced, real-time observability in large Docker environments. Grafana provides powerful filtering tools to isolate logs by instance, severity, or specific error codes.
Deployment fit: Pre-configured for Docker deployments via the docker-compose.grafana.yml component.

Security Note

By design, the Grafana web interface is bound exclusively to the local host machine (127.0.0.1). It is intentionally not exposed to external networks to prevent unauthorized access to your system logs.

Global Log Levels

Regardless of which output destination you choose, you have strict control over how verbose the logs are. The available levels are Information, Debug, Warning, and Error.

Best Practice: For production environments, the default and recommended level is Error. You should only change this value to Debug if explicitly instructed by Sendent Support to capture detailed diagnostics for bug resolution. The Debug level generates a massive amount of data and can quickly consume disk space or database performance.

Next Step

To learn how to activate and configure these logging methods, proceed to the Logging Configuration article.