Is it possible to log workflow and activity Temporal UI?

Community Support
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1

I’m working on improving observability for our Temporal workflows and activities. According to the observability documentation, Temporal provides comprehensive logging capabilities as part of its observability features.

I’m currently using the PHP SDK and would like to know:

What is the idiomatic way to view logs for a specific Workflow or Activity execution in the Temporal UI?

Specifically:

  • Are application logs (from within Activities/Workflows) automatically captured and displayed in the UI?

  • Should I be using structured logging with specific log levels?

  • Do I need to configure anything special to see logs in the Web UI’s workflow execution details?

  • Are there best practices for logging that make debugging easier through the UI?

Any guidance on the recommended approach would be appreciated!

2

Are application logs (from within Activities/Workflows) automatically captured and displayed in the UI?

No they are not.

UI provides event history view. Certain events like WorkflowTaskFailed/ActivityFailed/WorkflowExecutionFailed do include failure reason and stack trace which is included in event history and would be shown in the UI as well.

If you are looking for any/all worker logs, maybe look at info in docs here
if you are looking for otel tracing, see GitHub - temporalio/sdk-php-interceptors-opentelemetry: Opentelemetry interceptors package for PHP SDK if helps

1 Like
3

Thank you, will have a look! :folded_hands:

However, the Observability docs seem to suggest the logs are display to stdout and stderr, I was wondering if there was a way to enable displaying them in the Temporal UI but if it shows the failure reason and stack trace that should be enough.