Enable logging

Page Summary

• The Google Ads API Ruby library allows logging of requests, responses, and summary messages to a custom or default logger.

• Different log levels (INFO, DEBUG, WARN) are used for successful responses, API errors, and partial failures.

• Logging can be configured in the google_ads_config.rb file or by setting the logger on the client instance.

You can log requests, responses, and summary messages sent to the Google Ads API using either the default logger in the Ruby client library or your own custom Ruby logger. If no logging configuration is provided, logging is disabled by default.

Log levels

The library logs events at different log levels depending on the outcome of the API request:

Event type	Summary log level	Full request and response log level
Successful API response	INFO	DEBUG
API error	WARN	INFO
Partial failure	None	DEBUG (partial failure details)

Caution: At the DEBUG level, logs contain complete request and response payloads, which may include sensitive account data and generate large log volumes. Use DEBUG only for local troubleshooting, and don't leave DEBUG logging enabled in production environments.

Configuration

You can configure logging in your google_ads_config.rb configuration file or programmatically at runtime.

Default logger

Set up the default logger by specifying the log_level and log_target fields in your google_ads_config.rb file:

Google::Ads::GoogleAds::Config.new do |c|
  # Valid levels: 'DEBUG', 'INFO', 'WARN', 'ERROR', 'FATAL'
  c.log_level = 'INFO'

  # Output destination, such as STDOUT, STDERR, or a file path
  c.log_target = STDOUT
end

Custom logger

You can also specify your own custom Ruby Logger instance using the logger field. If you specify logger, then log_level and log_target are ignored:

require 'logger'

# In google_ads_config.rb:
Google::Ads::GoogleAds::Config.new do |c|
  c.logger = Logger.new('log/google_ads.log')
end

You can also assign a custom logger after instantiating the client using client.logger=. Note that this only takes effect on service clients fetched (client.service.<name>) after client.logger is set:

require 'logger'

client = Google::Ads::GoogleAds::GoogleAdsClient.new
client.logger = Logger.new(STDOUT)