Google Cloud Logging Data Source

Overview

The Google Cloud Logging Data Source is a backend data source plugin for Grafana, which allows users to query and visualize their Google Cloud logs in Grafana.

Setup

Enable Cloud Resource Manager API

You need to enable the resource manager API. Otherwise, your cloud projects will not be displayed in the dropdown menu.

You can follow the steps to enable it:

1. Navigate to the cloud resource manager API page in GCP and select your project
2. Press the Enable button

Generate a JWT file & Assign IAM Permissions

1. If you don't have gcp project, add a new gcp project. link
2. Open the Credentials page in the Google API Console
3. Click Create Credentials then click Service account
4. On the Create service account page, enter the Service account details
5. On the Create service account page, fill in the Service account details and then click Create and Continue
6. On the Grant this service account access to project section, add the Logs Viewer role and Logs View Accessor role under Logging to the service account. Click Done
7. In the next step, click the service account you just created. Under the Keys tab and select Add key and Create new key
8. Choose key type JSON and click Create. A JSON key file will be created and downloaded to your computer

If you want to access logs in multiple cloud projects, you need to ensure the service account has permission to read logs from all of them.

If you host Grafana on a GCE VM, you can also use the Compute Engine service account. You need to make sure the service account has sufficient permissions to access the scopes and logs in all projects.

Service account impersonation

You can also configure the plugin to use service account impersonation. You need to ensure the service account used by this plugin has the iam.serviceAccounts.getAccessToken permission. This permission is in roles like the Service Account Token Creator role (roles/iam.serviceAccountTokenCreator). Also, the service account impersonated by this plugin needs logging read and project list permissions.

Grafana Configuration

1. With Grafana restarted, navigate to Configuration -> Data sources (or the route /datasources)
2. Click "Add data source"
3. Select "Google Cloud Logging"
4. Provide credentials in a JWT file, either by using the file selector or pasting the contents of the file.
5. Click "Save & test" to test that logs can be queried from Cloud Logging.

An alternative way to provision the data source

After the plugin is installed, you can define and configure the data source in YAML files as part of Grafana’s provisioning system, similar to the Google Cloud Monitoring plugin. For more information about provisioning, and for available configuration options, refer to Provisioning Grafana.

The following YAML is an example.

apiVersion: 1

datasources:
  - name: Google Cloud Logging
    type: googlecloud-logging-datasource
    access: proxy
    jsonData:
      authenticationType: gce

Supported variables

The plugin currently supports variables for logging scopes. For example, you can define a project variable and switch between projects. The following screenshot shows an example using project, bucket, and view.

Below is an example of defining a variable for log views.

Alerting

Grafana Alerting is not directly supported due to how Logging Query Language works on Google Cloud. If you need to create alerts based on logs, consider using Log-based metrics and a Cloud Monitoring data source.

Licenses

Cloud Logging Logo (src/img/logo.svg) is from Google Cloud's Official icons and sample diagrams

As commented, JWTForm and JWTConfigEditor are largely based on Apache-2.0 licensed grafana-google-sdk-react