The gap

Every long-running program ends up wanting to know how long its main step took, and the answer is usually a print of a subtraction between two timestamps. That line is prose: a collector cannot query it, a second program cannot parse it, and it says nothing about whether the step worked. Platform telemetry sees the other side, pods and containers and their resource use, but it cannot know what the program meant by a step, and the volume of what it does know becomes an obstacle to finding the one number that mattered.

pflog is the small piece in between: a record shaped by the program, emitted where the platform already looks. The program names the span and nothing else. The record carries the outcome, so a failed call is a failed span, not a number that looks like every other.

The record

A span has these fields. The last six are the same fields, in the same formats, as hostlib keeps for a process, so a log of spans and a log of jobs read as one.

The outcome is read from the call the way a shell reads a program. An integer returned, or a SystemExit raised, is an exit status with 0 meaning success. A boolean is the status itself. Anything else returned without error is success. An exception is a failure, recorded and then raised on as if the span were not there.

Timing a function

The decorator takes a name and, optionally, a reporter. The function’s return value and exceptions pass through untouched.

from pflog import timed, FileReporter

@timed("recon", report=FileReporter("/out/spans.jsonl"))
def recon(subject: str) -> int:
    ...

Used bare, @timed names the span after the function and reports to standard error.

A command-line program’s main is the span that matters most. For a ChRIS plugin, the span goes on standard error, where CUBE keeps it with the rest of the plugin’s output.

@chris_plugin(...)
@timed("shexec")
def main(options: Namespace, inputdir: Path, outputdir: Path) -> int:
    ...

Timing a block

The context manager times a block and gives the open span a handle, for noting an error the block survived or an outcome the block knows better than the library.

from pflog import span_open

with span_open("slices") as span:
    for slice_ in slices:
        if not slice_.process():
            span.error_add(f"{slice_.name} was empty")

A span with errors is a failed span, however the block ended.

Where the record goes

A reporter is anything with a report(span) method. Five come with the library.

Standard error is the default on purpose. A program’s standard output may be data that another program parses; its standard error is where a line about the run belongs, and it is captured by every container runtime and log collector.

Reading it back

The pflog command reads files of JSON lines, span lines and hostlib job lines alike, and prints one row each.

pflog read /out/*/spans.jsonl
pflog read --failed /out/*/spans.jsonl
pflog read --json --failed /out/*/spans.jsonl | jq .errors

STARTED                     DURATION  STATUS  NAME
2026-10-14T09:14:51-04:00      0.306  ok      demo
2026-10-14T09:14:51-04:00      0.002  failed  demo
2026-10-14T09:14:52-04:00      0.003  failed  wc -l /nonexistent

pflog demo --file /tmp/spans.jsonl times a sleep and reports it, for seeing a span without writing code. pflog --man is the full manual.

What pflog is not

It is not a transport. A span is written where the program’s output already goes, and whatever collects that output carries it on; the library opens no sockets and posts to no server. It is not a profiler: one span per call, named by the program, not a trace of every function. It is not a logger: LogReporter writes through Python’s logging when a program wants spans in its log, but the library has no levels, no handlers and no configuration of its own.

Install

pip install pflog

Python 3.11 or later. One dependency, hostlib, for the host facts and the record formats shared with it.

Layout

pflog/
├── models/    Span, and hostlib's records re-exported
├── span/      timed, span_open, SpanBuilder
├── report/    JsonReporter, FileReporter, LogReporter, TeeReporter, NullReporter
└── cli/       the pflog command: read, demo, --man

docs/purpose.adoc says why the library exists, docs/architecture.adoc how it is built, docs/history.adoc where it came from.