About the Logging agent

This guide provides basic information about the Logging agent, an application based on fluentd that runs on your virtual machine (VM) instances.

How the Logging Agent Works

In its default configuration, the Logging agent streams logs from common third-party applications and system software to Logging; see the list of default logs. You can configure the agent to stream additional logs; see Configuring the Logging agent for details on agent configuration and operation.

It is a best practice to run the Logging agent on all your VM instances. The agent runs under both Linux and Windows. To install the Logging agent, see Installing the agent.

Supported operating systems

You can run the Logging agent on the following operating systems on compatible virtual machine (VM) instances:

CentOS 6 and 7
Debian 9 "Stretch"
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7
Ubuntu LTS 16.04 "Xenial", LTS 18.04 "Bionic", 18.10 "Cosmic" and 19.04 "Disco"
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP3, 12 SP2 for SAP, and 12 SP3 for SAP
Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019
Amazon Linux AMI (except Amazon Linux 2.0 AMI)

Supported environments

The Logging agent is compatible with the following environments:

Compute Engine instances. The Logging agent sends the logs to the project associated with each VM instance.

For instances without external IP addresses, you must enable Private Google Access to allow the Logging agent to send logs.
Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2) instances. The Logging agent sends the logs to the AWS connector project for your Workspace. Stackdriver creates this project for you when you connect your AWS account to a Workspace.

For the Logging agent to function correctly, the Amazon EC2 instance it runs on must be able to communicate with Google Cloud APIs, particularly the Logging API. This requires either an external IP address or a VPC internet gateway.

For these VM instances, a minimum of 250 MiB of resident (RSS) memory is required to run the Logging agent, but 1 GiB is recommended. For example, at a rate of 100 1-KB-sized log entries per second, the Logging agent with default configurations consumes 5% CPU on one core and 150 MiB memory. At a peak rate of 3,000 1-KB-sized log entries per second, the Logging agent, uses 80% CPU on one core and 250 MiB memory.

The following VM instances support Logging using their own software, so manually installing the Logging agent on them is not supported:

App Engine standard environment instances. App Engine includes built-in support for Logging. For more information, go to Logging in App Engine Apps.
App Engine flexible environment instances. Apps running in the App Engine flexible environment can write logs that are in addition to what is included in the App Engine standard environment. For more information, go to Logging and the App Engine flexible environment.
Google Kubernetes Engine node instances. You can enable support for Logging on your new or existing container clusters. For more information, see Enabling Stackdriver Logging for Google Kubernetes Engine.
Cloud Run container instances. Cloud Run includes built-in support for Logging. For more information, go to Logging and viewing logs.
Cloud Functions HTTP and background functions. Cloud Functions includes built-in support for Logging. For more information, go to Writing, Viewing, and Responding to Logs.

Agent access requirements

Running the agent requires access to the following DNS names:

OAuth2 token server: oauth2.googleapis.com

Older versions of the agent may require access to www.googlapis.com (full URL: https://www.googleapis.com/oauth2/v3/token).

If you're using an older version of the agent, it's recommended that you upgrade your agent to the latest version.
Logging APIs: logging.googleapis.com

Installing the agent requires access to the following DNS names:

(Linux) Google Cloud package repository: packages.cloud.google.com
(Windows) Google download server: dl.google.com

Logging agent source code

You do not need the information in this section unless you want to understand the source code or you have other special needs. The Logging agent is installed by the script described in the installation instructions.

The Logging agent, google-fluentd, is a modified version of the fluentd log data collector. google-fluentd is distributed in two separate packages. The source code is available from the associated GitHub repositories:

The GitHub repository named google-fluentd which includes the core fluentd program, the custom packaging scripts, and the output plugin for the Stackdriver Logging API.
- The output plugin is packaged as a Ruby gem and is included in the google-fluentd package. It is also available separately at the Ruby gem hosting service at fluent-plugin-google-cloud.
The GitHub repository named google-fluentd-catch-all-config which includes the configuration files for the Logging agent for ingesting the logs from various third-party software packages.

Deprecation policy

The Logging agent is subject to the Stackdriver agents deprecation policy.

Next steps

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Last updated June 28, 2019.