Capturing logs

Honeybadger provides handlers for popular Go logging libraries that send structured logs directly to Honeybadger Insights as events.

Supported libraries

• slog - Go’s standard structured logging package (Go 1.21+)
• zerolog - High-performance JSON logger

---

slog

The slog handler sends logs from Go’s standard log/slog package to Honeybadger Insights.

Requires Go 1.21+

Quick start

import (
    "log/slog"
    "github.com/honeybadger-io/honeybadger-go"
    hbslog "github.com/honeybadger-io/honeybadger-go/slog"
)

func main() {
    client := honeybadger.New(honeybadger.Configuration{
        APIKey: "PROJECT_API_KEY",
    })
    logger := slog.New(hbslog.New(client))
    logger.Info("app started", "version", "1.0.0")
}

This produces an event in Honeybadger Insights:

{
    "event_type": "log",
    "level": "INFO",
    "message": "app started",
    "version": "1.0.0"
}

Event types

The default event type is log. Set a custom event type for all logs using WithEventType:

audit := slog.New(hbslog.New(client).WithEventType("audit"))
audit.Info("user logged in", "user_id", 42)

Set the event type per log call with the event_type attribute:

logger.Info("user signup", "event_type", "user_lifecycle", "user_id", 123)
logger.Info("payment processed", "event_type", "payment", "amount", 99.99)

Attributes and groups

Use WithAttrs to add attributes to all logs, and WithGroup to nest attributes:

handler := hbslog.New(client).
    WithAttrs([]slog.Attr{slog.String("service", "api")}).
    WithGroup("http")

logger := slog.New(handler)
logger.Info("request handled", "status", 200, "method", "POST")

This produces:

{
    "event_type": "log",
    "level": "INFO",
    "message": "request handled",
    "service": "api",
    "http": {
        "status": 200,
        "method": "POST"
    }
}

Log level filtering

Control which logs are sent to Honeybadger:

// Only send WARN and above
handler := hbslog.New(client).WithLevel(slog.LevelWarn)
logger := slog.New(handler)

logger.Info("This is ignored")
logger.Warn("This is sent")

Use slog.LevelVar for dynamic level changes at runtime:

levelVar := new(slog.LevelVar)
levelVar.Set(slog.LevelInfo)

handler := hbslog.New(client).WithLevel(levelVar)
logger := slog.New(handler)

levelVar.Set(slog.LevelDebug) // Now debug logs will be sent

---

zerolog

The zerolog adapter sends logs from the rs/zerolog package to Honeybadger Insights.

Quick start

import (
    "github.com/rs/zerolog"
    "github.com/honeybadger-io/honeybadger-go"
    hbzerolog "github.com/honeybadger-io/honeybadger-go/zerolog"
)

func main() {
    client := honeybadger.New(honeybadger.Configuration{
        APIKey: "PROJECT_API_KEY",
    })
    writer := hbzerolog.New(client)
    logger := zerolog.New(writer).With().Timestamp().Logger()
    logger.Info().Msg("hello")
}

Options

WithEventType

Sets the default event type for all logs (default: "log"). Override per-log by including an event_type field:

writer := hbzerolog.New(client, hbzerolog.WithEventType("app_log"))

WithKeys

Customize field names if your zerolog uses non-standard keys. The writer remaps the time field to ts for Honeybadger:

writer := hbzerolog.New(
    client,
    hbzerolog.WithEventType("app_log"),
    hbzerolog.WithKeys("timestamp", "severity"), // defaults: "time", "level"
)