Unwanted cloud-init data written to syslog

[Paul Judt]

This issue is specific to AWS Ubuntu instances. Upon initial launch at the end of the cloud-init run I launch a secondary configuration management tool (Chef) that writes configs, keys, and secrets to it's chef-config.log. Unfortunately; since Chef is wrapped in cloud-init the information is captured in standard out and copied to the cloud-init.log and the ubuntu syslog. We then log all of our information to an aggregator. The concern is that I would like to share the syslog since it contains other data with software engineers and other operations people. I'm unable to do this and have to isolate the chef log, cloud-init log and the syslog. Not optimal.

I think the problem lies somewhere in here.

https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/topics/logging.html

"By default, cloud-init uses the logging configuration provided in /etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.d/05_logging.cfg. The default python logging configuration writes all cloud-init events with a priority of WARNING or higher to console, and writes all events with a level of DEBUG or higher to /var/log/cloud-init.log and via syslog."

https://github.com/cloud-init/cloud-init/blob/master/config/cloud.cfg.d/05_logging.cfg#L47-L48

[Ryan Harper (raharper)]

Hi,

Thanks for filing the bug. Are you using the cloud-init chef module? or are you using runcmd to execute chef directly?

Do you have an example of (with any secrets redacted) of the output you see in syslog that you would prefer not to see?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for cloud-init because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[James Falcon (falcojr)]

Tracked in Github Issues as https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/issues/3220