Article originally posted on InfoQ. Visit InfoQ

Google recently made its Cloud Logging Log Analytics feature generally available (GA), allowing users to search, aggregate, and transform all log data types, including application, network, and audit logs.

Last year the company released the Log Analytics feature in preview as a feature within the Cloud logging service. With the GA release, Google includes three new capabilities:

• Multi-region support for US and EU regions, allowing users to store and analyze their logs in the most convenient region, improving performance and reducing latency.
• Improved query experience to save and share queries, allowing users to reuse and share their most important queries.
• Support for custom retention for up to 10 years, where custom log retention pricing applies.

 
Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/devops-sre/log-analytics-in-cloud-logging-is-now-ga/

To leverage log analytics, users can create a log bucket and upgrade it to use Log Analytics using the Google Cloud console or the Google Cloud CLI (with the ‘gcloud logging’ command). Then, they can use SQL to query logs stored in their log bucket. In addition, to use BigQuery to query the data, users must create a linked dataset. 

Use cases for log analytics in Google Cloud logging can be, for instance, for debugging and troubleshooting purposes by querying log data to identify and diagnose issues with applications and infrastructure. Furthermore, log data can be used to monitor the performance of applications and identify bottlenecks or, when security related, queried to detect security breaches and suspicious activity.

Yuki Ito, a Software Architect, and Google Cloud Champion Innovator, tweeted:

> Log Analytics in Cloud Logging is now GA
I just started to use Log Analytics to generate insights from API access logs

Google’s competitor in the public cloud space, Microsoft, has a similar service in Azure also called Log Analytics (part of Azure Monitor). It is a tool in the Azure portal allowing users to edit and run log queries against data in the Azure Monitor Logs store. The queries are performed with a proprietary Kusto query language (KQL). In addition, AWS also offers log analytics capabilities through Amazon CloudWatch.

Lastly, the pricing of Log Analytics is included in the standard Cloud Logging pricing, and more details on the Cloud Logging service are available on the documentation landing page.