Cloudwatch Agent errors with: No option 'file' in section: 'loggers'

Question

I am trying to tune the log levels of the various loggers in the Cloudwatch Logs Agent, and according to the official AWS reference docs, it states that I should be able to add the following to /var/awslogs/etc/awslogs.conf, in order to achieve that:

[loggers]
keys=root,cwlogs,reader,publisher

[handlers]
keys=consoleHandler

[formatters]
keys=simpleFormatter

[logger_root]
level=INFO
handlers=consoleHandler

[logger_cwlogs]
level=INFO
handlers=consoleHandler
qualname=cwlogs.push
propagate=0

[logger_reader]
level=WARNING
handlers=consoleHandler
qualname=cwlogs.push.reader
propagate=0

[logger_publisher]
level=WARNING
handlers=consoleHandler
qualname=cwlogs.push.publisher
propagate=0

[handler_consoleHandler]
class=logging.StreamHandler
level=INFO
formatter=simpleFormatter
args=(sys.stderr,)

[formatter_simpleFormatter]
format=%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(process)d - %(threadName)s - %(message)s

When I do add it, logs forwarding stops and I see a relevant entry in /var/log/awslogs.log:

No option 'file' in section: 'loggers'

Removing the whole section resumes logging, but - obviously - no log levels have been tuned.

Any ideas what I might be doing wrong?

Answer 1

Do not add these options to awslogs.conf. Add them to a separate file that you then specify via the logging_config_file key in awslogs.conf:

/etc/awslogs/awslogs.conf

[general]
state_file = /var/lib/awslogs/agent-state
logging_config_file = /etc/awslogs/logging.conf
use_gzip_http_content_encoding = false
...

/etc/awslogs/logging.conf

[loggers]
keys=root,cwlogs,reader,publisher
file=/tmp/test

[handlers]
keys=consoleHandler

[formatters]
keys=simpleFormatter

[logger_root]
level=INFO
handlers=consoleHandler

[logger_cwlogs]
level=INFO
handlers=consoleHandler
qualname=cwlogs.push
propagate=0

[logger_reader]
level=WARNING
handlers=consoleHandler
qualname=cwlogs.push.reader
propagate=0

[logger_publisher]
level=WARNING
handlers=consoleHandler
qualname=cwlogs.push.publisher
propagate=0

[handler_consoleHandler]
class=logging.StreamHandler
level=INFO
formatter=simpleFormatter
args=(sys.stderr,)

[formatter_simpleFormatter]
format=%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(process)d - %(threadName)s - %(message)s

Answer 2

We had the same issue. In our case the root of the issue was that we put logging.conf file into /etc/awslogs/config but instead you have to put it into /etc/awslogs.

Your solution with file in loggers section didn't work for us we got new error

"No option 'log_group_name' in section: 'loggers'"

Our main awslogs file looks like

$ cat /etc/awslogs/awslogs.conf 
[general]
state_file = /var/lib/awslogs/agent-state
logging_config_file = /etc/awslogs/logging.conf
use_gzip_http_content_encoding = true

logging.conf looks like

$ cat /etc/awslogs/logging.conf 
[loggers]
keys=root,cwlogs,reader,publisher

[handlers]
keys=consoleHandler

[formatters]
keys=simpleFormatter

[logger_root]
level=INFO
handlers=consoleHandler

[logger_cwlogs]
level=INFO
handlers=consoleHandler
qualname=cwlogs.push
propagate=0

[logger_reader]
level=ERROR
handlers=consoleHandler
qualname=cwlogs.push.reader
propagate=0

[logger_publisher]
level=ERROR
handlers=consoleHandler
qualname=cwlogs.push.publisher
propagate=0

[handler_consoleHandler]
class=logging.StreamHandler
level=INFO
formatter=simpleFormatter
args=(sys.stderr,)

[formatter_simpleFormatter]
format=%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(process)d - %(threadName)s - %(message)s

At the moment we use

$ rpm -qa | grep awslogs
awslogs-1.1.2-1.10.amzn1.noarch