Implementing logging in multi-tenant application

Question

I am very much new to multi-tenancy. We have an application based on Java, Spring, Hibernate/JPA etc. which doesn't support multi-tenancy.

Now, we want to convert that application into multi-tenant one. I have read about multi-tenancy and even wrote one standalone application using hibernate with separate schema approach. Link referred is here.

I think about the logging part which is bound to be changed now as log files will be maintained per tenant(client) now. So, for each tenant a separate log file will be there.Also, log file for a particular tenant shouldn't be accessed by another tenant.

Is there any logging API specific to support multi-tenancy? If not, how should i go ahead with implementing logging in multi-tenant application? What should be taken care of while implementing logging in multi-tenant application.

Answer 1

you can use MDC (mapped diagnostic context) support to route logging for each tenant into a separate file/dir/whatever.

you can read up on the concept here. it exists in slf4/logback and log4j

simply put, you set some property like tenantName in the MDC at the beginning of every request processing according to the specific tenant making the request and then use this property in your logging configuration to determine the log file into which log messages are written.