Logging for IBM Cloud Load Balancer

As of 28 March 2024, the IBM Log Analysis service is deprecated and will no longer be supported as of 30 March 2025. Customers need to migrate to IBM Cloud Logs before 30 March 2025. During the migration period, customers can use IBM Log Analysis along with IBM Cloud Logs. Logging is the same for both services. For information about migrating from IBM Log Analysis to IBM Cloud Logs and running the services in parallel, see migration planning.

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 Cloud Logs 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 Logs service

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

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

To create a IBM Cloud Logs instance, perform the following procedure:

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.
You can use IBM Cloud Logs Routing, a platform service, to route platform logs in your account to a destination of your choice by configuring a tenant that defines where platform logs are sent. For more information, see About Logs Routing.

Log output examples

Sub-system name = Cloud Load Balancer

Field	Type	Description
`msgTimestamp`	Required	The timestamp that indicates when the log was generated.
`logSourceCRN`	Required	The load balancer UUID can be obtained from `logSourceCRN`.
`message`	Required	Datapath log message.

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

{
datetime:2025-01-22T14:11:18.847230+00:00
msgTimestamp:2025-01-22T14:11:18.847230+00:00
host:loadbalancer-wdc04-323716-1137319-1367523
process:Cloud Load Balancer
message:Connect from 5.181.190.248:37328 to 52.116.108.53:80 (fabf4139-50b0-48ba-b399-277c09162832/HTTP)
logSourceCRN:crn:v1:bluemix:public:cloud-load-balancer:us-east:a/5c59f412bc914beb390b080e07e5e6a2:6239a1a7-6da4-4370-881c-2dec099b8623::
saveServiceCopy:false
platformSource:Cloud Load Balancer
}

Details of the datapath log fieds are:

msgTimestamp is Coordinated Universal Time.
loadbalancer-wdc04-323716-1137319-1367523 is the load balancer name, and wdc04 is the data center.
323716 is the account ID. 1137319 is the load balancer ID. 1367523 is the load balancer instance ID.

The following output is an example of a health check log seen in the IBM Cloud Logs service:

{
  datetime:2025-01-16T11:32:05.100888+00:00
  msgTimestamp:2025-01-16T11:32:05.100888+00:00
  host:loadbalancer-wdc04-323716-1137319-1367279
  process:Cloud Load Balancer
  message:Health check for server ea3b5aa1-cd85-4374-8387-cbf155d35643/c8d09bae-4d1c-4579-8af1-6e2fa75e81b5-10.171.112.26 failed, reason: Layer4 timeout, check duration: 5001ms, status: 0/2 DOWN.
  logSourceCRN:crn:v1:bluemix:public:cloud-load-balancer:us-east:a/5c59f412bc914beb390b080e07e5e6a2:6239a1a7-6da4-4370-881c-2dec099b8623::
  saveServiceCopy:false
  platformSource:Cloud Load Balancer
  }