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About cluster logging | Logging | OpenShift Container Platform 4.5
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Understanding cluster logging

As a cluster administrator, you can deploy cluster logging to aggregate all the logs from your OpenShift Container Platform cluster, such as node system audit logs, application container logs, and infrastructure logs. Cluster logging aggregates these logs from throughout your cluster and stores them in a default log store. You can use the Kibana web console to visualize log data.

Cluster logging aggregates the following types of logs:

  • application - Container logs generated by user applications running in the cluster, except infrastructure container applications.

  • infrastructure - Logs generated by infrastructure components running in the cluster and OpenShift Container Platform nodes, such as journal logs. Infrastructure components are pods that run in the openshift*, kube*, or default projects.

  • audit - Logs generated by the node audit system (auditd), which are stored in the /var/log/audit/audit.log file, and the audit logs from the Kubernetes apiserver and the OpenShift apiserver.

Because the internal OpenShift Container Platform Elasticsearch log store does not provide secure storage for audit logs, audit logs are not stored in the internal Elasticsearch instance by default. If you want to send the audit logs to the internal log store, for example to view the audit logs in Kibana, you must use the Log Forwarding API as described in Forward audit logs to the log store.

About deploying cluster logging

OpenShift Container Platform cluster administrators can deploy cluster logging using the OpenShift Container Platform web console or CLI to install the Elasticsearch Operator and Cluster Logging Operator. When the operators are installed, you create a ClusterLogging custom resource (CR) to schedule cluster logging pods and other resources necessary to support cluster logging. The operators are responsible for deploying, upgrading, and maintaining cluster logging.

The ClusterLogging CR defines a complete cluster logging environment that includes all the components of the logging stack to collect, store and visualize logs. The Cluster Logging Operator watches the Cluster Logging CR and adjusts the logging deployment accordingly.

Administrators and application developers can view the logs of the projects for which they have view access.

For information, see Configuring the log collector.

About cluster logging components

The cluster logging components include a collector deployed to each node in the OpenShift Container Platform cluster that collects all node and container logs and writes them to a log store. You can use a centralized web UI to create rich visualizations and dashboards with the aggregated data.

The major components of cluster logging are:

  • collection - This is the component that collects logs from the cluster, formats them, and forwards them to the log store. The current implementation is Fluentd.

  • log store - This is where the logs are stored. The default implementation is Elasticsearch. You can use the default Elasticsearch log store or forward logs to external log stores. The default log store is optimized and tested for short-term storage.

  • visualization - This is the UI component you can use to view logs, graphs, charts, and so forth. The current implementation is Kibana.

This document might refer to log store or Elasticsearch, visualization or Kibana, collection or Fluentd, interchangeably, except where noted.

About the logging collector

OpenShift Container Platform uses Fluentd to collect container and node logs.

By default, the log collector uses the following sources:

  • journald for all system logs

  • /var/log/containers/*.log for all container logs

The logging collector is deployed as a daemon set that deploys pods to each OpenShift Container Platform node. System and infrastructure logs are generated by journald log messages from the operating system, the container runtime, and OpenShift Container Platform. Application logs are generated by the CRI-O container engine. Fluentd collects the logs from these sources and forwards them internally or externally as you configure in OpenShift Container Platform.

The container runtimes provide minimal information to identify the source of log messages: project, pod name, and container id. This is not sufficient to uniquely identify the source of the logs. If a pod with a given name and project is deleted before the log collector begins processing its logs, information from the API server, such as labels and annotations, might not be available. There might not be a way to distinguish the log messages from a similarly named pod and project or trace the logs to their source. This limitation means log collection and normalization is considered best effort.

The available container runtimes provide minimal information to identify the source of log messages and do not guarantee unique individual log messages or that these messages can be traced to their source.

For information, see Configuring the log collector.

About the log store

By default, OpenShift Container Platform uses Elasticsearch (ES) to store log data. Optionally, you can use the log forwarding features to forward logs to external log stores using Fluentd protocols, syslog protocols, or the OpenShift Container Platform Log Forwarding API.

The cluster logging Elasticsearch instance is optimized and tested for short term storage, approximately seven days. If you want to retain your logs over a longer term, it is recommended you move the data to a third-party storage system.

Elasticsearch organizes the log data from Fluentd into datastores, or indices, then subdivides each index into multiple pieces called shards, which it spreads across a set of Elasticsearch nodes in an Elasticsearch cluster. You can configure Elasticsearch to make copies of the shards, called replicas, which Elasticsearch also spreads across the Elasticsearch nodes. The ClusterLogging custom resource (CR) allows you to specify how the shards are replicated to provide data redundancy and resilience to failure. You can also specify how long the different types of logs are retained using a retention policy in the ClusterLogging CR.

The number of primary shards for the index templates is equal to the number of Elasticsearch data nodes.

The Cluster Logging Operator and companion Elasticsearch Operator ensure that each Elasticsearch node is deployed using a unique deployment that includes its own storage volume. You can use a ClusterLogging custom resource (CR) to increase the number of Elasticsearch nodes, as needed. Refer to the Elasticsearch documentation for considerations involved in configuring storage.

A highly-available Elasticsearch environment requires at least three Elasticsearch nodes, each on a different host.

Role-based access control (RBAC) applied on the Elasticsearch indices enables the controlled access of the logs to the developers. Administrators can access all logs and developers can access only the logs in their projects.

For information, see Configuring the log store.

About logging visualization

OpenShift Container Platform uses Kibana to display the log data collected by Fluentd and indexed by Elasticsearch.

Kibana is a browser-based console interface to query, discover, and visualize your Elasticsearch data through histograms, line graphs, pie charts, and other visualizations.

For information, see Configuring the log visualizer.

About event routing

The Event router is a pod that watches OpenShift Container Platform events so they can be collected by cluster logging. The Event router collects events from all projects and writes them to STDOUT. Fluentd collects those events and forwards them into the OpenShift Container Platform Elasticsearch instance. Elasticsearch indexes the events to the infra index.

You must manually deploy the Event router.

For information, see Collecting and storing Kubernetes events.

About log forwarding

By default, OpenShift Container Platform cluster logging sends logs to the default internal Elasticsearch log store, defined in the ClusterLogging custom resource (CR). If you want to forward logs to other log aggregators, you can use the log forwarding features to send logs to specific endpoints within or outside your cluster.

For information, see Forwarding logs to third party systems.