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Simple Log Service:What is Simple Log Service?

Last Updated:Sep 22, 2023

Simple Log Service is a cloud-native observability and analytics platform that provides large-scale, low-cost, and real-time services to process multiple types of data such as logs, metrics, and traces. Simple Log Service allows you to collect, transform, query, analyze, visualize, ship, and consume data. You can also configure alert rules in the console. Simple Log Service helps you improve digital capabilities in R&D, O&M, and data security.

Terms

The following table describes the terms that are used in Simple Log Service.

Term

Description

project

A project in Simple Log Service is used to isolate the resources of different users and control access to specific resources. For more information, see Project.

Logstore

A Logstore in Simple Log Service is used to collect, store, and query logs. For more information, see Logstore.

Metricstore

A Metricstore in Simple Log Service is used to collect, store, and query metrics. For more information, see Metricstore.

log

Logs are records of changes that occur in a system during the runtime of the system. The records contain information about the operations that are performed on specified objects and the results of the operations. The records are ordered by time. For more information, see Log.

log group

A log group is a collection of logs. A log group is the basic unit that is used to write and read logs. Logs in a log group contain the same metadata, such as the IP address and log source. For more information, see Log group.

metric

Metrics are stored as time series. For more information, see Metric.

trace

Traces indicate the execution process of an event or a procedure in a distributed system. For more information, see Trace.

shard

A shard is used to control the read and write capacities of a Logstore. In Simple Log Service, data is stored in shards. Each shard has an MD5 hash range, and each range is a left-closed, right-open interval. The ranges do not overlap with each other. Each range must be within the entire MD5 hash range [00000000000000000000000000000000,ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff). For more information, see Shard.

topic

A topic is a basic management unit in Simple Log Service. You can specify topics when you collect logs. This way, Simple Log Service can classify logs by topic. For more information, see Topic.

endpoint

An endpoint of Simple Log Service is a URL that is used to access a project and the data of the project. To access the projects in different regions, you must use different endpoints. To access the projects in the same region over an internal network or the Internet, you must also use different endpoints. For more information, see Endpoints.

AccessKey pair

An AccessKey pair is an identity credential that consists of an AccessKey ID and an AccessKey secret. The AccessKey ID and AccessKey secret are used for symmetric encryption and identity authentication. The AccessKey ID is used to identify a user. The AccessKey secret is used to encrypt and verify a signature string. The AccessKey secret must be kept confidential. For more information, see AccessKey pair.

region

A region is a physical location where a data center of Simple Log Service is deployed. You can specify a region when you create a project. After the project is created, you cannot change the region. For more information, see Supported regions.

Features

Simple Log Service provides the following features to meet the requirements of cloud-native observability and analytics in multiple business scenarios.

  • Data collection
    You can collect log data, trace data, or metric data from more than 50 types of data sources. These data sources include Alibaba Cloud services, servers, applications, IoT devices, mobile terminals, and open source software. You can also collect data that is transferred over standard protocols.
  • Log storage
    Log Service provides the hot and cold-tiered storage feature. You can use this feature to reduce the costs of long-term storage without negative impacts on the query, analysis, visualization, alerting, shipping, and transformation of log data in a Logstore.
  • Data transformation
    Log Service provides more than 200 built-in functions, more than 400 regular expressions, and flexible custom functions to filter, split, convert, enrich, and replicate data. This feature meets your business requirements for multiple scenarios, such as data distribution, data standardization, and data integration.
  • Query and analysis
    Log Service allows you to query and analyze petabytes of data in real time. This feature supports more than 10 operators, more than 10 machine learning functions, and more than 100 SQL functions. Log Service also provides the Scheduled SQL feature and the Dedicated SQL feature.
  • Visualization
    Log Service allows you to visualize query and analysis results. Log Service provides more than 10 types of charts, such as tables, line charts, bar charts, and maps. You can customize dashboards based on charts. You can also perform embedded analysis and drill-down analysis.
  • Alerting
    Log Service provides the integrated alerting feature. This feature includes the alert monitoring, alert management, and notification management systems. The alerting feature is suitable for multiple scenarios, such as DevOps, ITOps, AIOps, SecOps, and BizOps.
  • Consumption and shipping
    Log Service allows you to consume data by using Storm, Flume, or Flink in real time. You can also ship data to Object Storage Service (OSS), MaxCompute, or Time Series Database (TSDB) in real time.
  • Log Audit Service
    Log Audit Service supports all features of Log Service. Log Audit Service also supports automated and centralized log collection from cloud services across Alibaba Cloud accounts in real time. Then, you can audit the collected logs. In addition, Log Audit Service stores data required for audit and allows you to query and aggregate the data.

Usage

The following table describes the methods that you can use to use Simple Log Service.

Method

Description

Console

Simple Log Service provides a web console to manage your Simple Log Service resources. For more information, see Simple Log Service console.

SDK

Simple Log Service provides SDKs for various programming languages to facilitate custom development. For more information, see SDK overview.

API

Simple Log Service provides the API to manage your Simple Log Service resources. This method requires you to sign API requests. For more information, see API overview.

Note

We recommend that you use SDKs to avoid signature verification.

CLI

Simple Log Service provides a command-line interface (CLI) to manage your Simple Log Service resources. For more information, see CLI overview.

Pricing

Simple Log Service supports the pay-as-you-go billing method. You are charged based on your actual usage. Compared with a self-managed approach to deploy the Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana (ELK) stack, Simple Log Service allows you to reduce the total cost by 50%. For more information about billing methods and billable items, see Billable items of pay-by-feature.

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