Dev Logs Without the Noise

For local development, json logs often have a bunch of fields you might want for production observability, but almost never care about for local development. The script below is a template you can use to filter out fields you know are noise while allowing all other fields to come through unchanged. It'll also pretty-print for easier reading. The basic approach is using jq to delete noise fields with some looseness encoded to handle unexpected schema.

The exact filters and selects will need to be tailored for you specific logs, but a project I recently worked on had things roughly as below that were usually noise I wanted to hide.

# Delete the noisy fields we usually don't care about
# in dev and let jq pretty print and colorize
jq '. |
    del(.request.ip?) |
    del(.duration?) |
    del(.time?) |
    del(.env?) |
    del(.user_id?) |
    del(.msg? | select(. == "request served")) |
    del(.level? | select(. == "INFO")) |
    if .msg? | contains("[core]") then empty else . end |
    del(.revision?)'

To use this, pipe you server's json log output to this script. You can throw tee in the pipeline too if you want the full unfiltered log to disk, but the pretty version in your terminal.