Data logging

Data and health check logs are valuable for debugging and maintenance purposes. With the data logging feature enabled, IBM Cloud Load Balancer forwards these logs to the IBM Log Analysis under your account.

You can enable or disable this feature by:

Creating a load balancer and setting this feature to on.

Using the API enableOrDisableDataLogs.

Viewing logs in the IBM Cloud logging analysis service

Log in to the IBM Log Analysis with your IBM Cloud account. Logs can be viewed from the Log Analysis instance. Refer to Getting started with IBM Log Analysis for more information.

Data logs are only sent if your Softlayer and IBM Cloud accounts are linked.

To create a Log Analysis instance, follow these steps:

Select the IBM Cloud account associated with your Softlayer account, then select Create a logging instance. The logging instance creation dialog shows.
Choose the region from the dropdown list that corresponds to the data center where you provisioned the load balancer.

For a load balancer in SYD01, you would choose the region of Sydney.

For information on the mapping between regions and data center, refer to IBM Cloud global data centers.

After you choose your region, click Create to create the logging instance, then configure it by clicking Configure the platform service logs.

Log output examples

The following output is an example of an IBM Cloud® Load Balancer data log:

{"datetime":"2019-09-17T03:13:37.373247+00:00", "host":"loadbalancer-dal09-323716-880632-975820", "process":"Cloud Load Balancer", "message":" Connect from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:56771 to 169.55.233.136:80 (a9887082-02ff-440c-8e9e-f9026bdc209a\/HTTP)","logSourceCRN":"crn:v1:bluemix:public:logdna:us-south:a/5c59f412bc914beb390b080e07e5e6a2:ffff0000-ffff-0000-ffff-ffff0000ffff::"}

Be aware of the following:

datetime is Coordinated Universal Time.
loadbalancer-dal09-323716-880632-975820 is the load balancer name, and dal09 is the data center.
323716 is the account ID. 880632 is the load balancer ID. 975820 is the load balancer instance ID.
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is a public IP, which is masked for GDPR compliance.

The following output is an example of a health check log seen in the IBM Log Analysis that uses the IBM Cloud Log Analysis service:

{"datetime":"2019-09-11T08:04:22.534063+00:00", "host":"loadbalancer-dal09-323716-879158-975712", "process":"Cloud Load Balancer", "message":" Health check for server 9a226696-64b7-4f42-a587-74addd178f0e\/81035d8f-5e50-4743-ab04-20987c4c51be-10.143.99.103 succeeded, reason: Layer7 check passed, code: 200, info: \"HTTP status check returned code <3C>200<3E>\", check duration: 2ms, status: 4\/4 UP.","logSourceCRN":"crn:v1:bluemix:public:logdna:us-south:a/5c59f412bc914beb390b080e07e5e6a2:ffff0000-ffff-0000-ffff-ffff0000ffff::"}

10.143.99.103 is the back-end server member IP address.