Getting started with IBM Cloud Logs
IBM® Cloud Logs is a scalable logging service that persists logs and provides users with capabilities for querying, tailing, and visualizing logs.
Logs are comprised of events that are typically human-readable and have different formats, for example, unstructured text, JSON, delimiter-separated values, key-value pairs, and so on. The IBM Cloud Logs service can manage general purpose application logs, platform logs, or structured audit events. IBM Cloud Logs can be used with logs from both IBM Cloud services and customer applications.
The following steps guide you in creating an IBM Cloud Logs service instance, reviewing the UI, and sending logs to the service instance. These steps will let you create an environment for evaluation purposes only.
Before you begin
You must have a user ID that is a member or an owner of an IBM Cloud account. To get an IBM Cloud user ID, go to: Registration.
Step 1. Managing access to IBM Cloud Logs service
To access and manage the IBM Cloud Logs service, users and service IDs must be assigned access policies. An access policy maps a user or a service ID to certain IAM roles where these IAM roles define the actions that the user or the service ID can do with the IBM Cloud Logs service.
Follow the steps in Granting access to IBM Cloud Logs service to set up access to the IBM Cloud Logs service.
Step 2. Creating IBM Cloud Object Storage buckets or using an existing IBM Cloud Object Storage buckets
You need two dedicated IBM Cloud Object Storage buckets that will be used by your IBM Cloud Logs service instance to store log artifacts.
Follow the steps in Create some buckets to store your data to create new IBM Cloud Object Storage buckets if you do not already have buckets. If you already have IBM Cloud Object Storage buckets that you will use with IBM Cloud Logs you can skip this step.
Step 3. Creating an IBM Cloud Logs service instance
Next, create an IBM Cloud Logs service. An IBM Cloud Logs instance is created using the IBM Cloud catalog.
Follow the steps in Provisioning an instance to set up an IBM Cloud Logs instance.
Step 4. Accessing the IBM Cloud Logs UI
Once you instance is provisioned, you can explore the IBM Cloud Logs UI.
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Click the Explore logs icon
> Logs.
When initially provisioned, you might not see data flowing to the instance, so all dashboards and views might be blank.
Step 5. Routing logs to your IBM Cloud Logs instance
You can configure IBM Cloud Logs Routing in your account to route platform logs to IBM Cloud Logs.
You can also configure IBM Cloud Logs Routing to route log data from applications on your IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service or Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud clusters to your IBM Cloud Logs instance.
For information on IBM Cloud Logs Routing, see Getting started with IBM Cloud Logs Routing.
Cleaning up
After you have evaluated IBM Cloud Logs and you want to clean up your environment, you can delete your instance to remove the IBM Cloud Logs service you created for evaluation.