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.

A data bucket
A metrics bucket

For more information on buckets, see Configuring buckets for long term storage and search.

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.

Launch the IBM Cloud Logs UI.
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. Sending logs to your IBM Cloud Logs instance

You can send IBM Cloud platform data, and application, infrastructure, and operational logs to the IBM Cloud Logs instance.

Use the IBM Cloud Logs Routing service to route logs from your IBM Cloud account to your chosen target. For more information, see Getting started with IBM Cloud Logs Routing.
Use IBM Cloud Activity Tracker Event Routing to configure how to route auditing events, both global and location-based event data, in your IBM Cloud account. For more information, Getting started with IBM Cloud Activity Tracker Event Routing.
Use the Logging agent to send data to a Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud cluster. For more information, see Deploying the Logging agent on OpenShift using a Helm chart.
Use the Logging agent to send data to an IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service cluster. For more information, see Deploying the Logging agent on Kubernetes using a Helm chart.
Use the Logging agent to send data to a Linux server. For more information, see Managing the Logging agent for Linux.

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.