Use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging Service

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging service is a highly scalable and fully managed single view for all the logs in your tenancy. You can configure Verrazzano to send logs to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging instead of OpenSearch. For general information, see Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging Overview.

Set up custom logs

Verrazzano can send its logs to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure custom logs. You will need to provide two Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Log identifiers in your Verrazzano installation resource: one for Verrazzano system logs and one for application logs. Follow the steps in Creating Custom Logs to create two custom logs. Do not create an agent configuration when creating a custom log, otherwise the log records will be duplicated.

Configure credentials

The Fluentd plug-in included with Verrazzano will use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure instance principal authentication by default. Optionally, you can configure Verrazzano with a user API signing key. API signing key authentication is required to send logs to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging if the cluster is running outside of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Instance principal authentication

Create a dynamic group that includes the compute instances in your cluster’s node pools and assign the appropriate policy, so that the dynamic group is allowed to send log entries to the custom logs you created earlier. Pay close attention to the required permissions.

If the dynamic group and policy are configured incorrectly, then Fluentd will fail to send logs to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging.

User API signing key

If you do not already have an API signing key, then see Required Keys and OCIDs in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation. You need to create an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure configuration file with the credential details and then use that configuration file to create a secret.

The following requirements must be met for Fluentd Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging to work:

  1. The profile name in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure configuration file must be DEFAULT.
  2. The key_file path in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure configuration file must be /root/.oci/key. The actual key file does not need to be in that location, because you will be providing the actual key file location in a secret.
  3. The user associated with the API key must have the appropriate Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy in place to allow the Fluentd plug-in to send logs to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. See Details for Logging in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation for the IAM policies used by the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging service.

After the Verrazzano platform operator has been installed, create an opaque secret in the verrazzano-install namespace from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure configuration and private key files. The key for the configuration file must be config and the key for the private key file data must be key.

Here is an example kubectl command that will create the secret. 

$ kubectl create secret generic oci-fluentd -n verrazzano-install \
      --from-file=config=/home/myuser/oci_config --from-file=key=/home/myuser/keys/oci_api.pem

The secret should look something like this.

apiVersion: v1
data:
  config: W0RFRkFVTFRdCnVzZXI9b2NpZDEudXN...
  key: LS0tLS1CRUdJTiBQUklWQVRFIEtFWS0tLS...
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: oci-fluentd
  namespace: verrazzano-install
type: Opaque

For convenience, there is a helper script available here that you can point at an existing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure configuration file and it will create the secret for you. The script allows you to override the default configuration file location, profile name, and the name of the secret.

Specify custom logs

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Logging is enabled in your cluster when installing Verrazzano. The Verrazzano installation custom resource has fields for specifying two custom logs: one for system logs and one for application logs. Here is an example Verrazzano installation YAML file for each type of credential.

Instance principal credentials

apiVersion: install.verrazzano.io/v1beta1
kind: Verrazzano
metadata:
  name: vz-oci-logging
spec:
  profile: dev
  components:
    fluentd:
      enabled: true
      oci:
        systemLogId: ocid1.log.oc1.iad.system.example
        defaultAppLogId: ocid1.log.oc1.iad.app.example
    opensearch:
      enabled: false
    opensearchDashboards:
      enabled: false

User API credentials

When using user API credentials, you need to configure the name of the secret in the Verrazzano custom resource, under the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure section of the Fluentd component settings. Your YAML file should look something like this. 

apiVersion: install.verrazzano.io/v1beta1
kind: Verrazzano
metadata:
  name: vz-oci-logging
spec:
  profile: dev
  components:
    fluentd:
      enabled: true
      oci:
        systemLogId: ocid1.log.oc1.iad.system.example
        defaultAppLogId: ocid1.log.oc1.iad.app.example
        apiSecret: oci-fluentd
    opensearch:
      enabled: false
    opensearchDashboards:
      enabled: false

The apiSecret value must match the secret you created earlier when configuring the user API credentials.

Override the default log objects

You can override the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Log object on an individual namespace. To specify a log identifier on a namespace, add an annotation named verrazzano.io/oci-log-id to the namespace. The value of the annotation is the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Log object identifier.

Here is an example namespace. 

apiVersion: v1
kind: Namespace
metadata:
  annotations:
    verrazzano.io/oci-log-id: ocid1.log.oc1.iad.ns.app.example
  creationTimestamp: "2022-01-14T15:09:19Z"
  labels:
    istio-injection: enabled
    verrazzano-managed: "true"
  name: example
spec:
  finalizers:
  - kubernetes
status:
  phase: Active

Note that if you add and subsequently remove the annotation, then the logs will revert to the default Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Log object specified in the Verrazzano custom resource.