Locations

This page explains how regionality applies to Cloud Logging and lists the different geographical locations where you can store your log data.

Overview

In Logging, log buckets are regional resources: the infrastructure that stores, indexes, and searches your logs is located in a specific geographical location. With the exception of log buckets in the global, eu, or us regions, Google Cloud manages the infrastructure so that your applications are available redundantly across the zones within the region of the log bucket.

Your organization might be required to store its logs data in specific regions. The primary factors in selecting the region where your logs are stored include meeting your organization's latency, availability, or compliance requirements. When selecting a region for logs storage, consider the locations of the other Google Cloud products and services that your application uses.

Key concepts

The following key concepts apply to data regionality for Logging.

Log Router locations

The Log Router processes all log entries written to the Cloud Logging API. It checks each log entry against existing rules to determine which log entries to store in Logging buckets and which log entries to route to supported destinations using sinks. To reliably route logs, the Log Router also stores the logs temporarily, which buffers against temporary disruptions on any sink.

The Log Router processes logs in the region in which they are received. The Log Router might send logs to a different region based on a sink's definition or if you've opted to share log data with another Google Cloud service such as the Security Command Center Threat Detection. Sinks apply to logs equally and regardless of region.

Log bucket locations

Log buckets are the containers in your Google Cloud project, billing account, folder, and organization that store and organize your logs data.

For each Google Cloud project, billing account, folder, and organization, Logging automatically creates two log buckets: _Required and _Default, which are in the global location. You can't change the location of existing buckets. However, your organization can create a policy that sets a different default location for these buckets. For more information, see Configure default settings for organizations and folders.

You can also create user-defined log buckets for any Google Cloud project. When you create a user-defined log bucket, you can specify the location of the log bucket. After you create the log bucket, the location can't be changed, but you can create a new bucket and then direct log entries to the new log bucket by using sinks. To learn how to set the location for your buckets, see Regionalize your logs.

Logging supports querying logs from multiple regions together, in which case queries are processed in the same locations as the buckets being queried and then aggregated in the region the query was received from to return the results.

The region of a log bucket is shown on the Logs Storage page and on some dialogs. For example, when you to the Logs Explorer page and use the Refine scope selector to list log views, region information is also displayed. For this selector, when the region is global, both the region and the current storage location are displayed in a format similar to GLOBAL (US-WEST4).

Supported regions

The following regions are supported by Cloud Logging:

Global

Multi-regions: EU and US

Africa

Americas

Asia Pacific

Europe

Middle East

Limitations

Following are known limitations of data regionality for Cloud Logging:

• You can't get advisory notifications about sensitive actions when you configure your Admin Activity Logs to be located in a specific region. For more information, see Overview of Sensitive Actions notifications.

• You can't use customer-managed encryption keys (CMEK) on a log bucket when the log bucket is in the global region. For more information, see Configure CMEK for log buckets.

• Error Reporting is a global product and its services are available with no dependence on location. Logs buckets with a region besides global are automatically excluded from Error Reporting.

• Cloud Monitoring is a global product, and its services are available with no dependence on location. Log-based metrics let you define rules for aggregating logs into time series by processing logs at the Log Router. The storage location of these time series is unspecified.

Next steps

• Learn how to configure the default location for the _Default and _Required buckets created in your organization.

• Learn how to regionalize your logs.

• View all the Google Cloud services available in locations worldwide.

• Explore additional location-based concepts, such as zones, that apply to other Google Cloud services.

• Read the following whitepapers that provide best practices for data governance:

  • Logs data: A step by step guide for overcoming common compliance challenges

  • Data governance: Principles for securing and managing logs