JaaS logs through Go’s log/slog. Every request, reconcile, and lifecycle event is a structured record you can filter and parse rather than scrape with a regex. In operator mode, controller-runtime’s own output — leader election, cache sync, manager startup — flows through the same slog handler via the logr bridge (ctrl.SetLogger(logr.FromSlogHandler(...))), so the manager’s logs share the configured level and format instead of emitting controller-runtime’s default zap output.

The binary

Two flags control logging. They apply in every mode JaaS runs in:

• --log-level — debug, info, warn, or error. Default info.
• --log-format — json or text. Default json.

json emits one JSON object per line, the right choice for a log pipeline (Loki, Elasticsearch, Cloud Logging) that indexes structured fields. text emits human-readable key=value lines, handy when tailing logs at a terminal during local development.

The full flag list with defaults is on the configuration page .

Reading logs

With the default JSON format, pipe kubectl logs through jq. Tail the operator and pretty-print:

kubectl --namespace jaas logs deployment/jaas --follow | jq .

Filter to warnings and errors only:

kubectl --namespace jaas logs deployment/jaas | jq 'select(.level == "WARN" or .level == "ERROR")'

Follow a single snippet’s reconciles by selecting on the logged fields:

kubectl --namespace jaas logs deployment/jaas | jq 'select(.namespace == "team-a" and .name == "dashboards")'

Turn --log-level=debug on temporarily to see per-request evaluation detail and the operator’s reconcile decisions; leave it at info in production to keep the volume down.

The Helm chart

The chart exposes both flags under arguments:

arguments:
  # debug, info, warn, error
  logLevel: info
  # json, text
  logFormat: json

These map one-to-one onto --log-level and --log-format. Keep logFormat: json for any cluster whose logs are ingested by a structured pipeline; switch to text only for ad-hoc local clusters where a human reads the raw stream.