Real-time processing of log data with subscriptions
You can use subscriptions to get access to a real-time feed of log events from CloudWatch Logs and have it delivered to other services such as an Amazon Kinesis stream, an Amazon Data Firehose stream, or AWS Lambda for custom processing, analysis, or loading to other systems. When log events are sent to the receiving service, they are base64 encoded and compressed with the gzip format.
To begin subscribing to log events, create the receiving resource, such as a Kinesis Data Streams stream, where the events will be delivered. A subscription filter defines the filter pattern to use for filtering which log events get delivered to your AWS resource, as well as information about where to send matching log events to.
You can create subscriptions at the account level and at the log group level. Each account can have one account-level subscription filter. Each log group can have up to two subscription filters associated with it.
Note
If the destination service returns a retryable error such as a throttling exception or a retryable service exception (HTTP 5xx for example), CloudWatch Logs continues to retry delivery for up to 24 hours. CloudWatch Logs doesn't try to re-deliver if the error is a non-retryable error, such as AccessDeniedException or ResourceNotFoundException. In these cases the subscription filter is disabled for up to 10 minutes, and then CloudWatch Logs retries sending logs to the destination. During this disabled period, logs are skipped.
CloudWatch Logs also produces CloudWatch metrics about the forwarding of log events to subscriptions. For more information, see Monitoring with CloudWatch metrics.
You can also use a CloudWatch Logs subscription to stream log data in near real time to an Amazon OpenSearch Service cluster. For more information, see Streaming CloudWatch Logs data to Amazon OpenSearch Service.
Note
Subscriptions are supported only for log groups in the Standard log class. For more information about log classes, see Log classes.
Contents
Concepts
Each subscription filter is made up of the following key elements:
- filter pattern
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A symbolic description of how CloudWatch Logs should interpret the data in each log event, along with filtering expressions that restrict what gets delivered to the destination AWS resource. For more information about the filter pattern syntax, see Filter pattern syntax for metric filters, subscription filters, filter log events, and Live Tail.
- destination arn
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The Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the Kinesis Data Streams stream, Firehose stream, or Lambda function you want to use as the destination of the subscription feed.
- role arn
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An IAM role that grants CloudWatch Logs the necessary permissions to put data into the chosen destination. This role is not needed for Lambda destinations because CloudWatch Logs can get the necessary permissions from access control settings on the Lambda function itself.
- distribution
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The method used to distribute log data to the destination, when the destination is a stream in Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. By default, log data is grouped by log stream. For a more even distribution, you can group log data randomly.
For log group-level subscriptions, the following key element is also included:
- log group name
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The log group to associate the subscription filter with. All log events uploaded to this log group would be subject to the subscription filter, and those that match the filter are delivered to the destination service that is receiving the matching log events.
For account-level subscriptions, the following key element is also included:
- selection criteria
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The criteria used for selecting which log groups have the account-level subscription filter applied. If you don't specify this, the account-level subscription filter is applied to all log groups in the account. This field is used to prevent infinite log loops.. For more information about the infinite log loop issue, see Log recursion prevention.
Selection criteria has a size limit of 25 KB.
