S3 Archiving (Self-Install)

Security Requirements and Controls

LogScale supports archiving ingested logs to Amazon S3. The archived logs are then available for further processing in any external system that integrates with S3. The files written by LogScale in this format are not searchable by LogScale — this is an export meant for other systems to consume. See Amazon Bucket Storage or Google Bucket for using S3 as storage for segments in a format that LogScale can read.

When S3 Archiving is enabled all the events in repository are backfilled into S3 and then it archives new events by running a periodic job inside all LogScale nodes, which looks for new, unarchived segment files. The segment files are read from disk, streamed to an S3 bucket, and marked as archived in LogScale.

An admin user needs to set up archiving per repository. After selecting a repository on the LogScale front page, the configuration page is available under Settings.

Note

For slow-moving datasources it can take some time before segment files are completed on disk and then made available for the archiving job. In the worst case, before a segment file is completed, it must contain a gigabyte of uncompressed data or 30 minutes must have passed. The exact thresholds are those configured as the limits on mini segments.

Important

S3 archiving is not supported for S3 buckets where object locking is enabled.

For more information on segments files and datasources, see segments files and Data Sources.

S3 Layout (S3 Archiving)

When uploading a segment file, LogScale creates the S3 object key based on the tags, start date, and repository name of the segment file. The resulting object key makes the archived data browseable through the S3 management console.

LogScale uses the following pattern:

logscale
REPOSITORY/TYPE/TAG_KEY_1/TAG_VALUE_1/../TAG_KEY_N/TAG_VALUE_N/YEAR/MONTH/DAY/START_TIME-SEGMENT_ID.gz

Read more about Event Tags.

Format

The default archiving format is NDJSON and optionally raw log lines. When using NDJSON, the parsed fields will be available along with the raw log line. This incurs some extra storage cost compared to using raw log lines but gives the benefit of ease of use when processing the logs in an external system.

Setup

For a self-cloud installation of LogScale, you need an IAM user with write access to the buckets used for archiving. That user must have programmatic access to S3, so when adding a new user through the AWS console make sure programmatic access is ticked:

Setup

Figure 90. Setup


Later in the process, you can retrieve the access key and secret key:

Setup Key

Figure 91. Setup Key


This is needed in LogScale in the following configuration:

ini
S3_ARCHIVING_ACCESSKEY=$ACCESS_KEY
S3_ARCHIVING_SECRETKEY=$SECRET_KEY

The keys are used for authenticating the user against the S3 service. For more guidance on how to retrieve S3 access keys, see AWS access keys. For more details on creating a new user, see creating a new user in IAM.

Configuring the user to have write access to a bucket can be done by attaching a policy to the user.

IAM user example policy

The following JSON is an example policy configuration.

javascript
{
 "Version": "2012-10-17",
 "Statement": [
     {
         "Effect": "Allow",
         "Action": [
             "s3:ListBucket"
         ],
         "Resource": [
             "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET_NAME"
         ]
     },
     {
         "Effect": "Allow",
         "Action": [
             "s3:PutObject",
             "s3:GetObject"
         ],
         "Resource": [
             "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET_NAME/*"
         ]
     }
 ]
}

The policy can be used as an inline policy attached directly to the user through the AWS console:

IAM user example policy

Figure 92. IAM user example policy


Tag Grouping

If tag grouping is defined for a repository, the segment files will be split by each unique combination of tags present in a file. This results in a file in S3 per each unique combination of tags. The same layout pattern is used as in the normal case. The reason for doing this is to make it easier for a human operator to determine whether a log file is relevant.

Other Options
HTTP Proxy

If LogScale is set up to use an HTTP_PROXY_HOST, it will per default be used for communicating with S3. It can be disabled using the following:

ini
# Use the globally configured HTTP proxy for communicating with S3.
# Default is true.
S3_ARCHIVING_USE_HTTP_PROXY=false
Non-default endpoints

You can point to your own hosting endpoint for the S3 to use for archiving if you host an S3-compatible service like MinIO.

ini
S3_ARCHIVING_ENDPOINT_BASE=http://my-own-s3:8080
Virtual host style (default)

LogScale will construct virtual host-style URLs like https://my-bucket.my-own-s3:8080/path/inside/bucket/file.txt.

For this style of access, you need to set your base URL, so it contains a placeholder for the bucket name.

ini
S3_ARCHIVING_ENDPOINT_BASE=http://{bucket}.my-own-s3:8080

LogScale will replace the placeholder {bucket} with the relevant bucket name at runtime.

Path-style

Some services do not support virtual host style access, and require path-style access. Such URLs have the format https://my-own-s3:8080/my-bucket/path/inside/bucket/file.txt. If you are using such a service, your endpoint base URL should not contain a bucket placeholder.

ini
S3_ARCHIVING_ENDPOINT_BASE=http://my-own-s3:8080

Additionally, you must set S3_ARCHIVING_PATH_STYLE_ACCESS to true.

IBM Cloud Storage compatibility

S3 Archiving can be used with IBM Cloud Storage by setting S3_ARCHIVING_IBM_COMPAT to true.