Data regionality for Cloud Logging

This page explains how regionality applies to Cloud Logging and lists the different geographical locations where you can store your logs data.

Overview

In Logging, log buckets are regional resources: the infrastructure that stores, indexes, and searches your logs is located in a specific geographical location. Google manages that infrastructure so that your applications are available redundantly across the zones within that region.

Your organization might be required to store its logs data in specific regions. The primary factors in selecting the region where your logs are stored include meeting your organization's latency, availability, or compliance requirements. When selecting a region for logs storage, consider the locations of the other Google Cloud products and services that your application uses.

Key concepts

The following key concepts apply to data regionality for Logging.

Log Router locations

The Log Router processes all log entries written to the Cloud Logging API. It checks each log entry against existing rules to determine which log entries to store in Logging buckets and which log entries to route to supported destinations using sinks. To reliably route logs, the Log Router also stores the logs temporarily, which buffers against temporary disruptions on any sink.

The Log Router processes logs in the region in which they are received. The Log Router might send logs to a different region based on a sink's definition or if you've opted to share log data with another Google service such as the Security Command Center Threat Detection. Sinks apply to logs equally and regardless of region.

Log bucket locations

Log buckets are the containers in your Cloud project, billing account, folder, and organization that store and organize your logs data.

For each Cloud project, billing account, folder, and organization, Logging automatically creates two log buckets: _Required and _Default, which are set to the global location. You can also create user-defined buckets for any Cloud project.

When you create a user-defined bucket, you can specify a location region for storing its logs data. After you create the bucket, the location can't be changed, but you can create a new bucket and direct logs to that bucket using sinks. To learn how to set the region for your buckets, see Regionalize your Cloud project logs.

Logging supports querying logs from multiple regions together, in which case queries are processed in the same location as the buckets being queried and then aggregated in the region the query was received to return the results.

Supported regions

The following regions are supported by the Cloud Logging API:

Continent Regions
Asia asia-east1
asia-east2
asia-northeast1
asia-northeast2
asia-northeast3
asia-south1
asia-south2
asia-southeast1
asia-southeast2
Australia australia-southeast1
australia-southeast2
Europe europe-central2
europe-north1
europe-southwest1
europe-west1
europe-west2
europe-west3
europe-west4
europe-west6
europe-west8
europe-west9
North America northamerica-northeast1
northamerica-northeast2
us-central1
us-east1
us-east4
us-west1
us-west2
us-west3
us-west4
South America southamerica-east1
southamerica-west1

In addition to these regions, the global location is supported, which means that you don't specify where your logs are physically stored or processed.

Limitations

Following are known limitations of data regionality for Cloud Logging:

  • Error Reporting is a global product and its services are available with no dependence on location. Logs buckets with a region besides global are automatically excluded from Error Reporting.

  • Cloud Monitoring is a global product, and its services are available with no dependence on location. Logs-based metrics let you to define a rule for aggregating logs into time series by processing logs at the Logs Router. The storage location of these time series is unspecified.

Next steps