IBM Cloud Logs

IBM Cloud Logs is a scalable logging service that persists logs and provides users with capabilities for querying, tailing, and visualizing logs.

Logs are comprised of events that are typically human-readable and have different formats, for example, unstructured text, JSON, delimiter-separated values, and key-value pairs. You can use the events to investigate abnormal activity and critical actions and to comply with regulatory audit requirements. IBM Power Virtual Server automatically generates events so that you can track activity on your service.

IBM Cloud Logs replaces IBM Log Analysis and IBM Cloud Activity Tracker

As of 30 March 2025 the IBM Log Analysis and IBM Cloud Activity Tracker services are no longer supported. IBM Cloud Logs replaces these two services. For information about IBM Cloud Logs, see the IBM Cloud Logs documentation. Also it is important to note that while IBM Cloud Activity Tracker is being deprecated, activity tracker events will be supported in both the new IBM Cloud Logs service and with the existing IBM Cloud Activity Tracker Event Routing service. See Deprecation FAQ for more details. You may also refer to this blog for guidance on migrating your Activity Tracker instances to Cloud Logs.

For this demonstration guide, an IBM Cloud Logs instance is already provisioned. This instance tracks activities for the resources that are part of the PowerVS-L3 resource group in the shared cloud account. Your user ID has permission to open and view the IBM Cloud Logs dashboard.

In the steps that follow, learn how to:

  • Access the IBM Cloud Logs instance by using the IBM Cloud portal
  • Open the IBM Cloud Logs dashboard
  • Explore activities that are related to the PowerVS resources in this environment

Note, this demonstration guide does not provide detailed information on provisioning, configuring, and customizing IBM Cloud Logs, nor does it provide details on the meaning of individual activities.

  1. Click the IBM Cloud portal hamburger (A) menu, expand the Observability (B) menu and click Logging (C). image
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  2. The Observability page will open. Expand Logging (A) menu and click Instances (B). image

  3. All the Cloud Logs instances will be displayed. As mentioned earlier, an IBM Cloud Logs instance (CL-PowerVS-L3 (A)) already provisioned can be seen here. Click Dashboard (B). image

  4. Cloud Logs dashboard page will open up in a new browser tab or window. Navigate to the new browser tab or window, click Explore Logs (A) and select Logs (B). image

  5. Configure the filters to view only PowerVS specific logs. To do that, select the checkbox ibm-audit-event (A) under Application section, enter power-iaas (B) in the search box under Subsystem section and click Select All (C) to select all the power-iaas checkboxes that appear. These settings narrow the events in the current view to those related to the PowerVS infrastructure resources. IBM Cloud Logs can also filter based on the severity level of the event. For example, informational, debug, warning, errors, and critical events. image

  6. The search results window (A) displays PowerVS activity events. If no events are visible, click the Timeline (B) option and choose a different timeline, by expanding the time range or selecting an earlier time period, until the events appear. image

  7. Double-click (A) anywhere on an event to open it and view the details. The Text column provides finer details about the selected event. This includes information like what the event was (action), who initiated it, the outcome of the event and many more. Explore a few of the different events that exist. image image

For a complete list of all IBM Cloud Logs events for IBM Power Virtual Server, visit this page