Viewing log volume report

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Log volume reports display the volume of ingested log messages data that is associated to a specific time frame with monthly granularity.

Required privileges

Instana protects the log volume report page by the role-based access control (RBAC) mechanism. Only users that are assigned with the Instana owner group or a group with the permission to access log volume reports can access the log volume report settings.

To assign permission to access the log volume report to a user group, complete the following steps:

  1. From the navigation menu in the Instana UI, select Settings > Security & Access > Groups.

  2. Select a group, and click Edit.

  3. In the Edit access configuration window, click Global functions from the page menu.

  4. In the Log permissions area, select the Access log volume report checkbox.

    Figure 1. Log volume permission
    Log volume permission

The Access log volume report permission might require an add-on or additional configuration. For more information, see License and entitlement requirements.

Viewing log volume reports

To access log volume reports, assign the Access log volume report permission to the user through a group setting. For more information, see Required privileges for logs.

To view the log volume report, complete the following steps:

  1. From the navigation menu in the Instana UI, select Account and billing

  2. On the Usage tab, select Log messages from the Data granularity section.

    Figure 2. Log messages
    Log messages

  3. In the Log messages screen, configure the report by using the following options:

    Figure 3. Manage log volume
    Manage log volume

    • Time range: Select a time range for the report from the following options:

      • Current month (default value)
      • Past 3 months
      • Past 6 months
      • Past 9 months
      • Past 12 months

    • Group logs by (optional): Group the log volume according to the following infrastructure entities for more insights:

      • Deployment zone
      • Host name
      • Kubernetes namespace name
      • Kubernetes cluster name
      • Kubernetes daemonset name
      • Kubernetes deployment name

      After you select a grouping option, you can expand each line by clicking the chevron or the line itself to access the breakdown. All data that cannot be associated to a particular grouping value is indicated with a "-".

      Figure 4. Manage log volume grouping
      Manage log volume grouping

The log volume report displays the following information in a table format:

  • Retention plan: The retention period for the logs, such as 7 days or 30 days.
  • Percentage of usage: The percentage of the total log volume for each retention plan.
  • Ingestion volume: The total amount of log data ingested, displayed in GiB.

If you select a grouping option, you can expand each month to view daily breakdowns. If you do not select a grouping option, only monthly data is available for expansion.

Different retention time settings impact the consumption of the corresponding logging budgets. For more information, see Configuring extended log retention.

Computing log volume

The log volume is computed based on the information that Instana receives from customer systems. It is not based on pure ingress traffic and excludes protocol overhead. To compute the log volume, Instana computes the number of bytes of the following data pieces:

  • Actual ingested log message and extracted metadata from the log message, such as log-level and timestamps
  • All attached custom tags
  • Trace IDs
  • Span IDs
  • Information that is related to exceptions, such as stack traces and exception messages.