Log and monitor Rust Lambda functions

Amazon Lambda automatically monitors Lambda functions on your behalf and sends logs to Amazon CloudWatch. Your Lambda function comes with a CloudWatch Logs log group and a log stream for each instance of your function. The Lambda runtime environment sends details about each invocation to the log stream, and relays logs and other output from your function's code. For more information, see Using CloudWatch Logs with Lambda. This page describes how to produce log output from your Lambda function's code.

Creating a function that writes logs

To output logs from your function code, you can use any logging function that writes to stdout or stderr, such as the println! macro. The following example uses println! to print a message when the function handler starts and before it finishes.

use lambda_runtime::{service_fn, LambdaEvent, Error};
use serde_json::{json, Value};
async fn handler(event: LambdaEvent<Value>) -> Result<Value, Error> {
    println!("Rust function invoked");
    let payload = event.payload;
    let first_name = payload["firstName"].as_str().unwrap_or("world");
    println!("Rust function responds to {}", &first_name);
    Ok(json!({ "message": format!("Hello, {first_name}!") }))
}

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Error> {
    lambda_runtime::run(service_fn(handler)).await
}

Implementing advanced logging with the Tracing crate

Tracing is a framework for instrumenting Rust programs to collect structured, event-based diagnostic information. This framework provides utilities to customize logging output levels and formats, like creating structured JSON log messages. To use this framework, you must initialize a subscriber before implementing the function handler. Then, you can use tracing macros like debug, info, and error, to specify the level of logging that you want for each scenario.

use lambda_runtime::{service_fn, Error, LambdaEvent};
use serde_json::{json, Value};
#[tracing::instrument(skip(event), fields(req_id = %event.context.request_id))]
async fn handler(event: LambdaEvent<Value>) -> Result<Value, Error> {
    tracing::info!("Rust function invoked");
    let payload = event.payload;
    let first_name = payload["firstName"].as_str().unwrap_or("world");
    tracing::info!({ %first_name }, "Rust function responds to event");
    Ok(json!({ "message": format!("Hello, {first_name}!") }))
}

#[tokio::main]
async fn main() -> Result<(), Error> {
    tracing_subscriber::fmt().json()
        .with_max_level(tracing::Level::INFO)
        // this needs to be set to remove duplicated information in the log.
        .with_current_span(false)
        // this needs to be set to false, otherwise ANSI color codes will
        // show up in a confusing manner in CloudWatch logs.
        .with_ansi(false)
        // disabling time is handy because CloudWatch will add the ingestion time.
        .without_time()
        // remove the name of the function from every log entry
        .with_target(false)
        .init();
    lambda_runtime::run(service_fn(handler)).await
}

When this Rust function is invoked, it prints two log lines similar to the following:

{"level":"INFO","fields":{"message":"Rust function invoked"},"spans":[{"req_id":"45daaaa7-1a72-470c-9a62-e79860044bb5","name":"handler"}]}
{"level":"INFO","fields":{"message":"Rust function responds to event","first_name":"David"},"spans":[{"req_id":"45daaaa7-1a72-470c-9a62-e79860044bb5","name":"handler"}]}