Documentation Grafana Cloud Instrument and send data Logs Cloud Logs Export

Cloud Logs Export

Grafana Cloud Logs offers 30-day retention by default for paying customers, with the option to pay for longer retention if desired. However, you can also export your logs from Grafana Cloud Logs to your own long-term storage to meet business requirements, for example compliance or data control, or to perform analytics that must be performed outside of Grafana Cloud.

The Cloud Logs Export feature lets you sync logs stored in Grafana Cloud Logs with an object storage bucket that you own. You should make your own evaluation of which cloud storage provider’s features and cost best meet your business needs for accessing your archived logs. Notice that most long-term storage does charge for operations so you’re expected to configure budget alerts and usage metrics monitoring to avoid surprises. Cloud Logs Export supports the following cloud storage providers:

• Amazon S3 - Cloud Logs Export supports only the S3 Standard storage class.
• Azure Blob Storage - Cloud Logs Export only supports Hot Tier storage, optimized for storing data that is accessed or modified frequently.
• Google Cloud Storage - Cloud Logs Export supports all object storage classes (Hot, Cool, and Archive).

Your logs are exported using Loki’s open source chunk format, which means that you can query them using the command line tool, LogCLI, or within your own, self-hosted Loki cluster.

Creating a cloud log export involves the following steps:

1. Selecting your cloud provider.
2. Creating object storage in the cloud provider.
3. Configuring access to the storage.
4. Testing the connecting and enabling your object storage.

Administrators can configure Cloud Logs Export using the Cloud Logs Exporter plugin, which can be accessed from the Plugins navigation. The wizard will guide you through enabling cloud logs export.

The Cloud Logs Export feature starts syncing 7 days after it has been set up. The Cloud Logs Export feature continuously syncs logs from those younger than 30 days up to those 7 days old.

The Cloud Logs Export feature supports write-once object storage buckets. After files are written they are never overwritten. Note that the retention period for the exported logs will be determined by the lifecycle policies you set in your cloud storage provider.

Before you begin:

• Know which cloud provider you want to export to.

You can create a cloud logs export for:

• Amazon S3
• Azure Blob Storage
• Google Cloud Storage

Refer to Validating for validating the exported data.