SYSTEM Cited by 1 source
Scribe (Meta)¶
Scribe is Meta's standard logging framework — the ingestion pipeline that carries log events from any machine in Meta's fleet into warm + cold storage. Cited by name (not detailed) in the 2024-12-02 cryptographic monitoring post as the substrate "most of Meta's logs are constructed and written via Scribe."
Meta's public description of Scribe is the 2019 Core Infra post on Scribe. This wiki page is a stub — the 2024-12-02 post references Scribe as a given; it does not redocument it. When a future ingest covers the 2019 Scribe post in depth this page should be expanded.
Role for this wiki¶
- Canonical Meta ingestion substrate. Scribe is the company-wide logging entry point; any Meta system that emits logs typically does so via Scribe.
- Downstream is two-tier. Scribe feeds Scuba for warm / real-time analysis and Hive for cold / warehouse-scale analysis.
- The unified logging framework side of Meta's unified-offering story. Paired with FBCrypto on the telemetry-source side, Scribe's fleet ubiquity is what makes company-wide telemetry patterns like patterns/unified-library-for-fleet-telemetry practical.
Scale context¶
- Carries the flushed aggregated counts from FBCrypto's buffered logger — which is already volume-reduced from the per-operation rate ("machines often compute millions of cryptographic operations per day").
- Write throughput capacity is a real constraint. Meta discloses in the 2024-12-02 post that it has "occasionally found ourselves putting increased load on Scribe" when cryptographic usage growth outruns expected rates, and worked with the Scribe team to manage the spikes. This is what motivates the randomised-first-flush jitter discipline on the FBCrypto side.
Seen in¶
- sources/2024-12-02-meta-built-large-scale-cryptographic-monitoring — Scribe is the logging framework the FBCrypto buffered logger flushes to; capacity coordination with the Scribe team is named as an operational challenge.
Related¶
- systems/scuba-meta — warm downstream of Scribe.
- systems/meta-hive — cold downstream of Scribe.
- systems/fbcrypto — one of many logging producers on top of Scribe.
- patterns/aggregating-buffered-logger — the client-side pattern that sends data through Scribe.
- patterns/jittered-flush-for-write-smoothing — the discipline that normalises Scribe write rates from cohort-synchronised clients.
- patterns/unified-library-for-fleet-telemetry — the broader strategic posture this unified logging framework enables.