SLS periodically ships collected data to Alibaba Cloud services such as OSS and MaxCompute for long-term storage and offline analysis. You configure shipping destinations in the console.
How data shipping works
After you enable data shipping, SLS periodically sends collected data to a configured destination. This centralizes data from multiple machines for unified storage and downstream consumption.
Use cases
Data shipping supports data storage and offline analysis with typical latency of 5 to 30 minutes. The retention period depends on the destination.
Benefits
Data shipping provides the following benefits:
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Easy to use
Ship data to OSS and other destinations with a few console steps.
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Centralized data
Aggregates data from multiple machines for unified shipping to OSS and other destinations.
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Categorized management
Ship different data types from different projects to specific OSS buckets or MaxCompute tables.
Billing
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If the Logstore uses the Pay-by-ingested-data billing mode, data shipping is free of charge.
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If the Logstore uses the Pay-by-feature mode, data shipping incurs charges for read/write traffic, shipping fees, and API requests. Billable items of the pay-by-feature billing model.
Supported destinations
SLS ships data to the following destinations.
|
Destination |
Description |
|
OSS |
Ship data to OSS. Ship logs to OSS (legacy) and Ship logs to OSS (new). |
|
MaxCompute |
Ship data to MaxCompute:
|
|
Tablestore |
Pull data into Tablestore via LogHub Shipper for Tablestore. Use LogHub Shipper to ship Simple Log Service data. |
Difference from CloudLens for OSS
Shipping SLS logs to OSS and CloudLens for OSS are two different features intended for different scenarios:
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Data shipping: Exports data from a LogStore to OSS for archival storage. The raw logs remain in SLS, and you can configure separate retention periods for each side. Data shipping is suitable for scenarios such as data storage and batch analytics. It has relatively low real-time performance, with a typical latency of 5 to 30 minutes.
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CloudLens for OSS: A module of SLS used to centrally manage OSS bucket logs. By default, it automatically collects metering logs and time-series monitoring data. Access logs must be enabled manually. It provides visualized features such as resource usage, access analytics, outlier detection, and security analytics.
CloudLens for OSS is not intended for Kubernetes (K8s) log collection scenarios. For K8s log collection, use Logtail to collect logs to SLS, and then use a data shipping job to archive the logs to OSS.