I am trying to debug some complex cloud-config user data and am having trouble finding the location of the log entries of the specific commands that cloud-init is running for the user data.

As an example, I am starting an EC2 instance and providing some simple cloud-config user data of

## template: jinja
#cloud-config
runcmd:
  - echo 'unique-1234'
  - echo 'Hello Cloud' > /tmp/cloud.log

I can confirm that cloud-init is running my user data commands:

• the file /tmp/cloud.log exists and has the provided text
• the var/log/cloud-init-output.log file contains the echoed “unique-1234”

However, what I want is some log information on what user data modules and commands were actually run.

That data should be in /var/log/cloud-init.log, but I can’t find any evidence of it. There are lots of entries that look like:

• Running command ['lsb_release', '--all'] with allowed return codes [0] (shell=False, capture=True)

But a nothing about the user data provided commands I want to run. grep 'echo' /var/log/cloud-init.log has zero results.

After reading the logging documentation for cloud-init, I tried adding the following to my cloud-config yaml

reporting:
  debug_log:
    level: DEBUG
    type: log

but the results were the same — no new entries to cloud-init.log.