Quickly Remove Clutter from vRO Logs

14 Mar 2022Updated 1 Nov 20262 min read182 views

Orchestrator logs start every line with a long timestamp and severity. Paste them into Notepad++ or VS Code and use these regexes for workflow and action logs to strip the clutter and keep just the messages.

Mayank Goyal

In this article

Orchestrator gives you a good amount of logs out of the box, but they aren’t pleasant to read. Every line starts with a long date, time and severity like 2022-03-14 02:33:03.144 -04:00INFO. If you want to share logs with someone in a tidy way, or keep the results of an action or workflow run, a regex can strip all that clutter in one go. Here’s how I do it.

Tested on: VCF Operations Orchestrator 9.1.1 (same log format as 8.x) and vRealize Orchestrator 8.x (original post, 2022).

How it works

Copy the logs from the Logs tab of a workflow run or action run, paste them into a text editor that supports regular expressions, and replace the timestamp part with nothing. I use Notepad++, but VS Code’s Replace (with the .* regex option turned on) works the same way.

Step by step

Open Replace in Notepad++

After a workflow or action run, copy the logs and paste them into Notepad++.
Press Ctrl + H to open the Replace tab.

Orchestrator logs pasted into Notepad++ with the Replace tab open

Paste one of the regexes below into Find what, leave Replace with empty, set Search Mode to Regular expression and tick Wrap around.

Notepad++ search mode set to Regular expression with Wrap around ticked

Regex for workflow logs

.+?(?=:)+.+?(?=:)+.+?(?=:)+:(00|30)+(INFO|WARNING|DEBUG|ERROR)

An alternative from the original post, which matches the date and time by pattern:

([0-9]+(-[0-9]+)+) [0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}:[0-9]{2}(\.[0-9]{1,3})? ([+-]?(?=\.\d|\d)(?:\d+)?(?:\.?\d*))(?:[Ee]([+-]?\d+))? [A-Za-z]+

Regex for action logs

Action logs also include the action name in brackets, so this one removes that too:

.+?(?=:)+.+?(?=:)+.+?(?=:)+:(00|30)+(INFO|WARNING|DEBUG|ERROR)+([^)]+)\)+( +?|\t)(?=(([^"]*"){2})*[^"]*$)

Replace all

Click Replace All.

Result

Only the log messages are left. Here’s a quick demo:

You can also try the regexes on sample logs at Regexr: workflow logs and action logs.

Things to watch out for

Time zone offset. The first workflow regex and the action regex expect an offset ending in :00 or :30, like -04:00 or +05:30. If your server runs in a zone like +05:45, change (00|30) to (00|30|45).
Keep a copy. Replace All changes the whole file, so keep the original logs if you might need the timestamps later.
Build your own. If your log format is different, you can create a regex quickly with the Regex Generator.

Wrapping up

A small trick, but it saves me a lot of scrolling when I share logs or paste them into a ticket. If you have a better regex, feel free to share it in the comments. See you in the next post.