View logs routed to Cloud Logging buckets

This document explains how you can find log entries that you routed to Cloud Logging buckets. Log buckets are Cloud Logging storage containers in your Trusted Cloud projects that hold your logs data. You can create log sinks to route all, or just a subset, of your logs to any bucket in Cloud Logging. This flexibility lets you choose which Trusted Cloud project your logs are stored in and what other logs are stored with them.

Logs that you route to Cloud Logging buckets are available immediately.

For information about viewing logs routed to other destinations, see the following documents:

Before you begin

For instructions about how to create and manage log buckets, see the following documents:

For a conceptual discussion of sinks, see Overview of routing and storage models: Sinks.

For instructions about how to route your logs, see Route logs to supported destinations.

View logs

To troubleshoot and view individual log entries in a log bucket, do the following:

  1. In the Trusted Cloud console, go to the Logs Explorer page:

    Go to Logs Explorer

    If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Logging.

  2. In the Action toolbar, select Refine scope.
  3. On the Refine scope dialog, select Log view.

  4. Select one or more log views and then click Apply.

    For information about how to run queries, see Build queries in the Logs Explorer.

Log entries organization

Logging log entries are objects of type LogEntry.

Log entries with the same log type, referred to as [LOG_ID] in the LogEntry reference, usually have the same format. The following table shows sample log entries:

syslog

The following is an example of a Compute Engine syslog:

{
  insertId: "4zymupf98ac6v"
  jsonPayload: {
    message: "Jul 15 13:36:33 my-instance dhclient[328]: DHCPACK of 10.240.0.48 from 169.254.169.254"
  }
  logName: "projects/my-gcp-project-id/logs/syslog"
  receiveTimestamp: "2024-07-15T13:36:33.400534415Z"
  resource: {
    labels: {
      instance_id: "0123456789" (instance_name: my-instance)
      project_id: "my-gcp-project-id"
      zone: "us-central1-a"
    }
    type: "gce_instance"
  }
  timestamp: "2024-07-15T13:36:33.097822178Z"
}

request_log

The App Engine request_log has log entries containing protoPayload fields which hold objects of type RequestLog:

{
  httpRequest: {
    status: 200
  }
  insertId: "669525c0000d39d1eab2bb03"
  labels: {1}
  logName: "projects/my-gcp-project-id/logs/appengine.googleapis.com%2Frequest_log"
  operation: {4}
  protoPayload: {
    @type: "type.googleapis.com/google.appengine.logging.v1.RequestLog"
    appEngineRelease: "1.9.71"
    appId: "s~my-gcp-project-id"
    startTime: "2024-07-15T13:36:00.861387Z"
    ...
  }
  receiveTimestamp: "2024-07-15T13:36:01.169966997Z"
  resource: {2}
  spanId: "7925702051311044593"
  timestamp: "2024-07-15T13:36:00.861387Z"
  trace: "projects/my-gcp-project-id/traces/8a4fab4bd4fbafac2a0fa901c1485847"
  resource: {
    labels: {
      module_id: "default"
      project_id: "my-gcp-project-id"
      version_id: "20200221t133337"
      zone: "us14"
    }
    type: "gae_app"
  }
}

activity

The activity log is an Admin Activity audit log. Its payload is a JSON representation of the AuditLog type:

{
  insertId: "dlu8qwc69c"
  labels: {
    compute.googleapis.com/root_trigger_id: "a97f30b1-45ab-4c12-9309-8e8af3bb011f"
  }
  logName: "projects/my-gcp-project-id/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity"
  operation: {
    id: "operation-1721047950764-61d48b3bf2b65-1ba1f256-82e9b5fd"
    last: true
    producer: "compute.googleapis.com"
  }
  protoPayload: {
    @type: "type.googleapis.com/google.cloud.audit.AuditLog"
    authenticationInfo: {...}
    methodName: "v1.compute.instances.insert"
    request: {...}
    requestMetadata: {...}
    resourceName: "projects/my-gcp-project-id/zones/us-central1-f/instances/my-instance"
    serviceName: "compute.googleapis.com"
  }
  receiveTimestamp: "2024-07-15T12:52:41.376292847Z"
  resource: {
  labels: {
    instance_id: "2891866457752773984" (instance_name: my-instance)
    project_id: "my-gcp-project-id"
    zone: "us-central1-f"
    }
    type: "gce_instance"
  }
  severity: "NOTICE"
  timestamp: "2024-07-15T12:52:40.965840Z"
}

Troubleshooting

If logs seem to be missing from your sink's destination or you otherwise suspect that your sink isn't properly routing logs, then see Troubleshoot routing and sinks.