---
layout: docs
page_title: Logs
description: |-
  Waypoint app logs are aggregated and available to view via the CLI and UI.
---

# Application Logs

Waypoint app logs are aggregated and available to view via the CLI and UI.

Waypoint logs provide a real-time snapshot
of logs with minimal retention. The point of Waypoint logs are to debug
emergent application behavior rather than historical behavior.
Waypoint log aggregation is not meant to be a replacement for a full
logging solution such as Datadog. For most deployments, Waypoint will retain
days of logs per application.

This functionality requires the [Waypoint entrypoint](/docs/entrypoint).

## Log History Limits

Logs are currently limited to 16,000 lines per application instance. When
the limit is reached, logs will begin overwriting the oldest previous data.

Assuming the average length of a line is 100 ASCII characters, this is an
overhead of about 1.6 MB per application instance when the log buffer is
full. The Waypoint server stores all logs in-memory so this can be used to
predict memory requirements.

-> This is not currently configurable. In a future version of Waypoint
we will make this configurable.

## Writing to the Log

Any output written to standard out (`stdout`) or standard error (`stderr`)
is captured as logs.

If you're seeing a delay in log output, you may need to disable output
buffering. Output buffering is sometimes enabled by default for certain
languages and environments. Please check with your language documentation.

This functionality requires the [Waypoint entrypoint](/docs/entrypoint).

## Viewing Logs with the CLI

To view logs with the CLI, use the `waypoint logs` CLI. This will
stream all logs for all deployments of a single application in a project.
If you deploy a new version of the application, the logs will appear without
restarting the CLI command:

```shell-session
$ waypoint logs
```
