Thursday, January 7, 2021

You can now "tail -f" in Google Cloud Logging

Use the "tail -f" command while monitoring logs? You can now use it in Google Cloud Logging

Google just announced a new and excellent feature in its Google Cloud Logging service: the ability to run commands similar to tail -f against your cloud logs.

What's tail -f?

Tail is a popular *nix tool used to display the tail end of a text file or piped data. The -f option is a frequent utilized tool used on Linux servers where sysadmins can monitor files as they are updated.

About Cloud Logging

Cloud Logging aggregates logs from across Google Cloud, on-premises or other clouds, indexing, aggregating logs into metrics, scanning for unique errors with Error Reporting and making logs available for search.

What's new?

Google added a new tool to mimic the behavior of the tail -f command, making it possible to display the contents of a log file to the console in real time. You can even use the logging query language's features (like global search, regular expressions, substring matches, etc) in your queries in real-time.

Using Google Cloud Logging Tail

Tailing logs with gcloud is now available to all users in Preview. Those willing to try out the new feature can test it out with a command similar to:

gcloud alpha logging tail "severity>=ERROR"

Running the likes of the above command looks like: