Kubernetes Logs (DEPRECATED)

Version history
caution
This feature is in its end-of-life process. This feature was deprecated in GitLab 14.5. It will be removed completely in GitLab 15.2.
On self-managed GitLab, by default this feature is not available. To make it available, ask an administrator to enable the feature flag named monitor_logging and the one named certificate_based_clusters. On GitLab.com, this feature is not available. This feature is not recommended for production use.

GitLab makes it easy to view the logs of running pods in connected Kubernetes clusters. By displaying the logs directly in GitLab in the Log Explorer, developers can avoid managing console tools or jumping to a different interface. The Log Explorer interface provides a set of filters above the log file data, depending on your configuration:

Pod logs

  • Namespace - Select the environment to display. Users with Maintainer or greater permissions can also see pods in the gitlab-managed-apps namespace.
  • Scroll to bottom - Scroll to the end of the displayed logs.
  • Refresh - Reload the displayed logs.

To learn more about the Log Explorer, see APM - Log Explorer.

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Requirements

Deploying to a Kubernetes environment is required to use Logs.

Accessing the log explorer

To access the Log explorer, select the More actions menu on a metrics dashboard and select View logs, or:

  1. Sign in as a user with the View pod logs permissions in the project.
  2. To navigate to the Log Explorer from the sidebar menu, go to Monitor > Logs (Introduced in GitLab 12.5.).

  3. To navigate to the Log Explorer from a specific pod on a deploy board:

    1. Go to Deployments > Environments and find the environment which contains the desired pod, like production.
    2. On the Environments page, you should see the status of the environment’s pods with deploy boards.
    3. When mousing over the list of pods, GitLab displays a tooltip with the exact pod name and status. deploy boards pod list
    4. Select the desired pod to display the Log Explorer.

Logs view

The Log Explorer lets you filter the logs by:

Loading more than 500 log lines is possible from GitLab 12.9 onward.

Support for pods with multiple containers is coming in a future release.

Support for historical data is coming in a future release.