Log content autodiscovery (Logs Classic)
Log Monitoring Classic
By default, Dynatrace automatically discovers all new log files that meet the requirements described below.
Default autodiscovery
Dynatrace automatically discovers, analyzes, and stores (if selected for storage) logs every 60 seconds.
Whether your autodiscovered files are stored in Dynatrace depends on the log ingest rules.
By default, the OneAgent log module autodiscovers the following categories of log files:
-
System logs
On Windows:Windows Security Log
Windows Application Log
Windows System Log
On Linux:
/var/log/messages
/var/log/syslog
-
Log files opened by running processes. For details, see Log content autodiscovery (Logs Classic)
-
IIS Logs (Windows only) - both event logs and plain log files
-
Container logs (Linux only) in Kubernetes, Openshift, and non-instrumented Docker. For details, see Log Monitoring in Kubernetes (Logs Classic)
Attributes selected in Windows event logs
For Windows event logs, Log Monitoring detects the following fields and sends them as custom attributes:
Semantic attribute name
Event property
winlog.level
Event.RenderingInfo.Level
winlog.levelid
Event.System.EventID
winlog.provider
Event.System.Provider.<xmlattr>.Name
winlog.task
Event.System.Task
winlog.opcode
Event.RenderingInfo.Opcode
Autodiscovery requirements
A log file must meet all of the following requirements in order to be autodiscovered:
-
The log file must be opened by an important process.
-
The log file must exist for a minimum of one minute.
Unsupported timestampsFiles with an unsupported timestamp are automatically timestamped with the time the file was read.
-
The logs must have a supported character encoding. By default, the supported encoding is UTF-8. Other supported types include UTF-8 BOM and, if the files contain the byte-order mark (BOM), UTF-16LE and UTF-16BE.
Binary logsBinary log files are not detected automatically. You can use custom log sources with Allow binary format option set to ingest Binary log files.
-
The log file must be at least 0.5 KB in size.
-
The log file must have been updated (written to) in the last 7 days.
Log files that have not been updated in the past 7 days while Log Monitoring is active will not be visible on dashboards. -
The log file must be in the actual
log
orlogs
folder or in its subfolders:- Valid path examples:
c:\log\log_file.txt
c:\logs\NewFolder\log_file.txt
- Invalid path example:
c:\log\NewFolder\NewFolder\log_file.txt
or the log filename must contain a
log
string preceded or followed by the period (.
) or underscore (_
) character:- Valid filename examples:
c:\NewFolder\abc.log
c:\NewFolder\0865842.log.txt
- Invalid filename example:
c:\NewFolder\logfile.txt
- Valid path examples:
Turn off log autodiscovery
If you don't want Dynatrace to automatically discover new log files on a specific monitored host, you can turn off log autodiscovery.
- On the host, open the log analytics configuration file for editing.
- On Linux:
/var/lib/dynatrace/oneagent/agent/config/ruxitagentloganalytics.conf
- On Windows:
%PROGRAMDATA%\dynatrace\oneagent\agent\config\ruxitagentloganalytics.conf
- On Linux:
- Set the following:
AppLogAutoDetection = false
OneAgent restart is not required.
Limits for your log autodiscovery when using OneAgent
Log files in One agent:
- cannot be deleted earlier than a minute after creation.
- must be appended (old content is not updated).
- must have text content.
- must be opened constantly (not just for short periods of adding log entries).
- must be opened in write mode.
Unsupported autodiscovery scenarios
Scenarios that are not supported in the rotated log autodiscovery process include:
- Rotated log generation with a directory change. This process could lead to the creation of numerous non-aggregated and/or incomplete logs, as well as to resource overuse.
- Rotated log generation with immediate compression, where the application addresses a file with the same name. If a rotation criterion is met (for example, the required file size is reached), the file is moved to another location and immediately compressed.
Example:
/var/log/application.log -> /var/log/application.log.1.gz -> /var/log/application.log.2.gz -> /var/log/application.log.3.gz
. This process might again lead to incomplete log creation.