Log Aggregation Setup

Log aggregation brings all your application logs into a centralized system so you can search, analyze, and correlate them with performance data. Centralized logs help engineers troubleshoot incidents faster, spot patterns across services, and retain historical records for audits, compliance, or post‑incident reviews.

In your monitoring dashboard, create a new application or logging project and copy the ingestion key for logs.

Standardize log formats (JSON, key‑value, or structured logs) so fields such as timestamp, level, service name, and trace ID are consistently captured.

Add tags like environment, service, region, and instance so you can filter logs by source easily.

Decide how long logs should be retained and which fields should be indexed for faster search performance.

Ensure logs are sent over secure channels (TLS/SSL) and credentials are stored safely (not hard‑coded).

The most granular logs come from within your code — debug statements, warnings, errors, and business event logs.

These capture request access, latency, client IPs, and status codes (e.g., NGINX, Apache, reverse proxy logs).

Capture logs from the OS and services like cron jobs, container runtimes, or orchestration layers.

Logs from Docker, Kubernetes pods, nodes, schedulers, and related components help troubleshoot infrastructure‑level issues.

If possible, ingest logs from databases, cache layers, message queues, and any external systems your app depends on.

By pulling logs from these integration points into one aggregation platform, you gain a unified view of system behavior.

Create entries of various severity levels (info, warn, error, debug) to confirm logs are being shipped correctly.

Use filters like service, environment, or level to ensure fields are parsed and indexed properly.

Trigger a trace while generating a log entry with a matching trace ID to confirm cross‑reference works.

Restart your log shipper or container to ensure logs are picked up consistently even after interruptions.

Check that logs persist according to retention rules and that access controls prevent unauthorized viewing.

Testing ensures you can reliably search and analyze logs when troubleshooting or auditing.