Get Started with Logs | VMware Aria Operations for Applications Documentation

Learn about VMware Aria Operations for Applications (formerly known as Tanzu Observability by Wavefront) metrics, logs, and traces.

Important: The Logs feature is enabled only for selected customers. To participate, contact your account representative or technical support.

VMware Aria Operations for Applications helps you monitor your application using metrics, traces, and logs. For example, you can:

Use metrics to get the numerical data and identify and alert on the performance issues in a system.
Use traces for an overview of all application services and to find bottlenecks.
Use logs to find the root cause of issues.

shows that Operations for Applications supports all three pillars : metrics, traces, and logs.

Note:

Our service retains logs for 30 days during the Logs free trial or retains logs for 7 days when on the freemium subscription! To retain logs for a longer period, contact your account representative or technical support.
Only users with the Logs permission can view the Logs Browser and drill down into logs from charts, alerts, and traces. See for details..</p>

What’s a Log?

Logs are structured or unstructured text records of events that took place at a given time. Our service ingests logs in JSON or JSON Lines format.

Log Attributes

Each log has required attributes, standard attributes, and custom tags. We tokenize the values of these attributes and tags, so that you can filter and search logs.

Tip: If your logging solution doesn’t use exactly the same tags, you can use a proxy configuration file to map your tags to the expected attributes and tags. See My Logging Solution Doesn’t Use the Default Attributes.

Required attributes	timestamp or log_timestamp: The time when the log was created. The value must be in Epoch milliseconds. If your log shipper sends this attribute with a different name, use the `customTimestampTags` proxy configuration property to establish the mapping. If you don't send or map this attribute, we set the value by using our system time. message or text: The body of the log entry. Can be up to 20k characters. If your log shipper sends this attribute with a different name, use the `customMessageTag` proxy configuration property to establish the mapping.
Standard attributes	These attributes are required if you want to drill into logs from charts and traces. source: A unique platform that emits the log, such as an AWS EC2 instance or a node in Kubernetes. To ensure that you can drill into logs from charts, use matching source values for logs and metrics. To ensure that you can drill into logs from traces, use matching source values for logs and traces. application: Name of the application that emits the log. To ensure that you can drill into logs from traces, use matching application values for logs and traces. If your log shipper sends this attribute with a different name, use the `customApplicationTags` proxy configuration property to establish the mapping. service: Name of the service that emits the log. To ensure that you can drill into logs from traces, use matching service values for logs and traces. If your log shipper sends this attribute with a different name, use the `customServiceTags` proxy configuration property to establish the mapping.
Custom Tags	You can send logs with additional custom tag key-value pairs of your choice. Make sure the custom tags are low-cardinality tags. Many of the recommendations in Optimizing Data Shape to Improve Performance apply.

Log Data Format Example

Image giving an overview of the attributes in a log. They are listed in the table above.

Send Logs

You can send your logs using a log shipper, such as Fluentd that sends logs as JSON arrays over HTTP, or Fluent Bit that sends logs as JSON lines over HTTP. See Send logs to our service.

A diagram shows how logs are sent from a log shipper to our service components

Note: Our service does not support logs ingestion for the OpenTelemetry Protocol.

View Logs and Troubleshoot

When logs start flowing into our service, as a user with the Logs permission, you can:

Go to the Logs Browser directly to view and explore logs.
You can create a logs chart on a dashboard so you can troubleshoot faster.
Drill into the Logs Browser from charts, alerts, application map, and the Traces Browser.
Customize log settings
- If your metrics, logs, and traces have different tags, you can map the metrics and traces tags to the log tags.
- Customize the time window on a chart or Traces Browser when drilling into logs from a chart and trace.

A diagram that shows all the UI pages that link to logs (charts, alerts, application map and Traces Browser). How to navigate from each one of them to the Logs Browser is explained in the sections below.

Learn More!

Send logs.
View and browse logs.
Learn about the proxy configurations and proxy preprocessor rules for logs.
See Logs troubleshooting.