newrelic is wiping message object when uses log forwarding with pinohttp

[petermilan]

Description

if the logger sends just object with message field, it is successfully logged through pinohttp into console, however the message is not present in forwarded log in newrelic

Expected Behavior

Pino log should be in newrelic should be equal to the log in console (containing message field)

Steps to Reproduce

newrelic.js:

exports.config = {
  app_name: 'Test newrelic pino',
  license_key: 'REDACTED',
  application_logging: {
    forwarding: {
      enabled: true,
      max_samples_stored: 10000,
    },
  },
};

index.js

require('newrelic');
const express = require('express');
const logger = require('pino-http');

const app = express();

app.use(logger());


app.get('/', (req, res) => {
  req.log.info({
    message: 'Test message',
    message2: 'foo bar',
  });
  res.end('hello world')
})
app.listen(3000)

then run following CURL:

curl --request GET \
  --url http://localhost:3000/ \
  --header 'User-Agent: insomnia/10.0.0'

as result of

  req.log.info({
    message: 'Test message',
    message2: 'foo bar',
  });

• console will contain following log:

{"level":30,"time":1726833856289,"pid":2225,"hostname":"REDACTED","req":{"id":4,"method":"GET","url":"/","query":{},"params":{},"headers":{"host":"localhost:3000","cookie":"x-ms-gateway-slice=estsfd; stsservicecookie=estsfd","user-agent":"insomnia/10.0.0","accept":"*/*"},"remoteAddress":"::ffff:127.0.0.1","remotePort":58881},"res":{"statusCode":200,"headers":{"x-powered-by":"Express"}},"responseTime":2,"msg":"request completed"}

but in newrelic the message is not present:

{
  "entity.guid": "REDACTED",
  "entity.guids": "REDACTED",
  "entity.name": "REDACTED",
  "entity.type": "SERVICE",
  "hostname": "REDACTED",
  "level": "info",
  "message2": "foo bar",
  "newrelic.source": "logs.APM",
  "pid": 2225,
  "req.headers.accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.7",
  "req.headers.accept-encoding": "gzip, deflate, br, zstd",
  "req.headers.accept-language": "sk-SK,sk;q=0.9,cs-CZ;q=0.8,cs;q=0.7,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.5",
  "req.headers.cache-control": "max-age=0",
  "req.headers.connection": "keep-alive",
  "req.headers.cookie": "REDACTED",
  "req.headers.dnt": "1",
  "req.headers.host": "localhost:3000",
  "req.headers.sec-ch-ua": "\"Google Chrome\";v=\"129\", \"Not=A?Brand\";v=\"8\", \"Chromium\";v=\"129\"",
  "req.headers.sec-ch-ua-mobile": "?0",
  "req.headers.sec-ch-ua-platform": "\"macOS\"",
  "req.headers.sec-fetch-dest": "document",
  "req.headers.sec-fetch-mode": "navigate",
  "req.headers.sec-fetch-site": "none",
  "req.headers.sec-fetch-user": "?1",
  "req.headers.upgrade-insecure-requests": "1",
  "req.headers.user-agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/129.0.0.0 Safari/537.36",
  "req.id": 1,
  "req.method": "GET",
  "req.remoteAddress": "::1",
  "req.remotePort": 58422,
  "req.url": "/",
  "span.id": "REDACTED",
  "timestamp": 1726833780150,
  "trace.id": "REDACTED"
}

as can be seen, log contains only "message2": "foo bar", and message is missing.

Your Environment

macOS Sonoma 14.6.1 (23G93)
node -v
v22.5.1

Additional context

It looks like somewhere in newrelic/instrumentation/pino - it is owerriding the message field in object using unexisting (optional) second parameter.
which results in empty message.

[workato-integration]

https://new-relic.atlassian.net/browse/NR-315759

[jsumners-nr]

The issue is at

node-newrelic/lib/instrumentation/pino/pino.js

Line 134 in 92e6978

const agentMeta = Object.assign({}, { timestamp: Date.now(), message: msg }, metadata)

Basically, at that point msg is undefined. So agentMeta looks like:

{
  "timestamp": 1726842894459,
  "entity.name": "New Relic for Node.js tests",
  "entity.type": "SERVICE",
  "trace.id": "f68574cbbfd69beb2a3b52b59f250291",
  "span.id": "4cd74b7072e6f440",
  "message": undefined
}

This is due to a misuse of the logger. As detailed in Pino's documentation (https://github.com/pinojs/pino/blob/0ab1bdd258acd00f82103206f385e4525010a8ff/docs/api.md#logging-method-parameters):

// This is a simple merging object that does not have any
// properties interpreted by the logger:
logger.info({ message: 'whatever' })

// This "merging object" has a special property that
// correlates to the intended message to be logged.
logger.info({ msg: 'whatever' })

// This is equivalent to the previous line:
logger.info('whatever')

[jsumners-nr]

@petermilan let's please reach a consensus about the nature of this before opening pull requests. We do not see this as a bug according to the given information. Please explain if you think otherwise, why.

[petermilan]

So the reason why I think it should be fixed is, that I would expect to see whatever log I see in the console, to see it in the newrelic. Fact that I see rendered message in console output of pino, and not in newrelic is very confusing - and was even hard to track down.

Also the fact, that the message is visible in console feels, like they did not implemented console output behavior based on their documentation.

[mrickard]

Considering that the current behavior of the New Relic Node Agent reflects the documented behavior of the pino library, I wouldn't consider this a bug. It's best handled in application code, where pino's being used.

[jsumners-nr]

I have the start of a reproduction if we decide to pick this up:

issue-2595.test.js

/*
 * Copyright 2024 New Relic Corporation. All rights reserved.
 * SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0
 */

'use strict'

const test = require('node:test')
const assert = require('node:assert')
const { Writable } = require('node:stream')

const helper = require('../../lib/agent_helper')

test('does not strip message property', (t, end) => {
  const logs = []
  const dest = new Writable({
    write(chunk, encoding, callback) {
      logs.push(JSON.parse(chunk.toString()))
      callback()
    }
  })
  const agent = helper.instrumentMockedAgent({
    application_logging: {
      forwarding: { enabled: true }
    }
  })
  const pinoHttp = require('pino-http')
  const { logger } = pinoHttp({ level: 'info' }, dest)

  helper.runInTransaction(agent, (tx) => {
    logger.info({ message: 'keep me', message2: 'me too' })

    tx.end()

    const agentLogs = agent.logs.getEvents()
    assert.equal(agentLogs.length, 1, 'aggregator should have recorded log')
    assert.equal(logs.length, 1, 'stream should have recorded one log')

    // Verify the destination stream log has the expected properties.
    assert.equal(logs[0].message, 'keep me')
    assert.equal(logs[0].message2, 'me too')

    const foundLog = agentLogs[0]()
    // assert.equal(foundLog.message, 'keep me')
    assert.equal(foundLog.message2, 'me too')

    // The forwarded log should have all keys that were logged to the
    // destination stream by Pino.
    for (const key of Object.keys(logs[0])) {
      assert.equal(Object.hasOwn(foundLog, key), true, `forwarded log should have key "${key}"`)
    }

    end()
  })
})

package.json

{
  "name": "pino-tests",
  "targets": [{"name":"pino","minAgentVersion":"8.11.0"}],
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "private": true,
  "tests": [
    {
      "engines": {
        "node": ">=18"
      },
      "dependencies": {
        "pino": ">=7.0.0",
        "flush-write-stream": "2.0.0",
        "split2": "4.1.0"
      },
      "files": [
        "pino.tap.js"
      ]
    },

    {
      "engines": {
        "node": ">=18"
      },
      "dependencies": {
        "pino": ">=7.0.0",
        "pino-http": ">=10.3.0"
      },
      "files": [
        "issue-2595.test.js"
      ]
    }
  ]
}