"foreman-tail" for Foreman with log level set to "debug": Reduce logged items

tl;dr: Create setting for notifications polling interval so that I can hide /notification_recipients in my logs.

Context: Foreman+Katello with foreman-installer --log-level debug logs notifications and other less interesting things. This makes reading logs harder than necessary. Example in production.log:

2026-06-22T09:51:21 [I|app|1ae58e78] Started GET "/notification_recipients" for 1.2.3.4 at 2026-06-22 09:51:21 +0000
2026-06-22T09:51:21 [I|app|1ae58e78] Processing by NotificationRecipientsController#index as JSON
2026-06-22T09:51:21 [I|app|1ae58e78] Completed 200 OK in 12ms (Views: 0.2ms | ActiveRecord: 1.1ms | Allocations: 2234)

At the same time, there’s a similar line in foreman-ssl_access_ssl.log:

1.2.3.4 - - [22/Jun/2026:10:01:51 +0000] "GET /notification_recipients HTTP/2.0" 304 - "https://foreman.example.com/new/hosts/host.example.com" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/152.0"

Use case: Run foreman-tail and then test procedures in WebUI. Then, read the logs while/after clicking around in the WebUI.

Goal: Make it easier to read logs of Foreman+Katello with log level “debug”. IMO hiding notifications would be a neat start.

Change in code: I packaged foreman with a different interval; see webpack/assets/javascripts/react_app/redux/actions/notifications/index.js and webpack/assets/javascripts/react_app/redux/actions/notifications/constants.js. Is there a way to change this after packaging Foreman? (no because of webpack) → Should I open a ticket to expose this as an option to foreman-installer?

XY problem: I think that I want a way to set to notifications interval. Or, should I build a wrapper around foreman-tail instead to filter out unwanted messages?

Search results that did not fully solve my problem; potentially because I do not understand them well enough:

Ping @jeremylenz because I found Revisiting Action Cable for notifications, 6 years later My post might be related or at least improve the UX despite the underlying technology.

Ping @thorbend just FYI

1 Like

Another idea would be making notifications its own logger, so it can be configured with its own loglevel similar to ldap. Then you could even suppress all notification messages while having debug for all other messages.

1 Like

I never thought about that being a build time option due to webpack, but you’re right.

I think this is the real answer. For sure this shouldn’t be an installer option.