Kubernetes Pod Logs

GitLab makes it easy to view the logs of running pods in connected Kubernetes clusters. By displaying the logs directly in GitLab, developers can avoid having to manage console tools or jump to a different interface.

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Overview

Kubernetes pod logs can be viewed directly within GitLab.

Pod logs

Requirements

Deploying to a Kubernetes environment is required in order to be able to use Pod Logs.

Usage

To access pod logs, you must have the right permissions.

You can access them in two ways.

From the project sidebar

Introduced in GitLab 12.5.

Go to Operations > Pod logs on the sidebar menu.

Sidebar menu

From Deploy Boards

Logs can be displayed by clicking on a specific pod from Deploy Boards:

  1. Go to Operations > 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, a tooltip will appear with the exact pod name and status. Deploy Boards pod list
  4. Click on the desired pod to bring up the logs view.

Logs view

The logs view will contain the last 500 lines for a pod, and has control to filter via:

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

Support for historical data is coming in a future release.

Introduced in GitLab 12.7.

When you enable Elastic Stack on your cluster, you can search the content of your logs via a search bar.

The search is passed on to Elasticsearch using the simple_query_string Elasticsearch function, which supports the following operators:

+ signifies AND operation
| signifies OR operation
- negates a single token
" wraps a number of tokens to signify a phrase for searching
* at the end of a term signifies a prefix query
( and ) signify precedence
~N after a word signifies edit distance (fuzziness)
~N after a phrase signifies slop amount