PA system logging overview

This section describes the system logging processes available for Platform Administrators (PA) as part of the Logging solutions of Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped.

When the Logging pipeline is up and running, the platform automatically collects operational and audit logs from GDC standard components running by default in any cluster. Those components include, among others, backup, billing, and networking so that you can perform operations such as network monitoring. Then, you can view organization-level logs for data observability in the monitoring instance of the platform-obs project.

During the bootstrap process of GDC, the system automatically configures audit and operational logs collection pipelines. GDC uses retention times from Organization custom resources (CR) to set up lifecycle and retention policies for object storage buckets and Loki configurations. If no retention times are specified, default values are applied as follows:

  • Infrastructure Operator (IO) audit logs: 2000 days
  • Platform Administrator (PA) audit logs: 400 days
  • Operational logs: 90 days

You can query two types of logs for the entire organization:

  • Audit logs. They record user and administrative activities on privileged operations and help you achieve auditing and compliance requirements on GDC. For a complete list with descriptions and details of the collected audit logs from all components in GDC, see the Audit logs overview.
  • Operational logs. They record conditions, changes, and actions as you manage ongoing operations in applications and services on GDC. These logs help developers and operators to test and debug applications. For a complete list of resources for which GDC collects operational logs, see the operational logs overview.