When an Odoo system goes into production, log management usually doesn’t seem important… until a problem occurs. At that moment, logs become the key to understanding what happened and resolving it quickly. They generally leave traces of what has happened and allow us to evaluate many of the steps in detail.
In development environments, it’s common to work directly with local logs, running Odoo in debug mode or checking the `odoo.log` file. However, in production the situation changes:
- We don’t want to give direct server access to the whole team.
- The volume of logs can be very high, so we need to carefully monitor what data we collect.
- Fast and efficient searches are needed to detect patterns or recurring errors.
- Security and audit policies must be met. Not everyone should access the server or the data.
Why are they so important?
Logs are Odoo’s memory: they contain every error, every warning, and also performance information that can help anticipate problems before they affect users. A good logging policy allows you to:
- Detect one-off errors without needing to reproduce them.
- Analyze system behavior over time.
- Improve security by detecting suspicious access or patterns.
- Facilitate communication between developers, sysadmins, and consultants.
Additionally, Odoo logs include relevant information such as attack attempts, access volumes, or performance issues.
Storage and Access Strategies
There are several ways to centralize and manage logs:
- Rotating files (logrotate):a simple solution, but limited for searches.
- Relational databases:allow queries, but are not optimized for large log volumes.
- Specialized indexing and search systems:designed for heavy loads and distributed access.
Our experience: ElasticSearch + LogStash
In our case, we chose a stack based on ElasticSearch + LogStash. On one side, LogStash acts as the collector, processing and normalizing Odoo logs. On the other, ElasticSearch indexes all the information, enabling complex searches in seconds. Finally, the visualization layer (Kibana) makes it easy to create dashboards and alerts.
With this setup, we achieve:
- Centralized logs from different environments and servers.
- Technical access without granting permissions on production machines.
- Proactive incident detection with configurable alerts.
- Performance trend analysis in Odoo with historical views.
Conclusion
Log management is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. Having a robust system to store, access, and analyze Odoo logs prevents major incidents, strengthens security, and enables teams to work more efficiently.
In our case, ElasticSearch and LogStash have allowed us to take a qualitative leap in how we manage log information, and we believe any serious Odoo project should consider a similar strategy from the start. In any case, the choice of tool is up to each team—but the need is equally important in every case.