In the paradignm of cloud service management, one of the crucial aspects is log management. Logs provide valuable information for troubleshooting and system monitoring.
If your project is implemented on Liferay PaaS or Liferay SaaS, you don't have much to worry about, since both Liferay PaaS and SaaS offer out-of-the-box storage and management of logs for the deployed Services. However, it is quite common to deal with clients who want to store logs in third-party systems such as their own infrastructure, in order to cover auditing needs, for example.

Using the tools that Liferay Cloud's infrastructure offers for handling logs from deployed services, I share a bash script that simplifies the task of downloading logs from services deployed in Liferay Cloud, allowing storage in local infrastructure for later processing. This script is a practical solution for system administrators and developers looking for an efficient way to extract and store logs without complications.

What does this script do and what is it for?

This script uses Liferay Cloud Platform Tools (CLI) to access Logs and is intended to automate the log download process for the entire default service stack in Liferay Cloud, saving them to a compressed file on a daily basis. It is functional on both Liferay SaaS and Liferay PaaS (a.k.a. Liferay Experience Cloud & Liferay Experience Cloud Self-Managed). Key features are as follows:
 

1. Log download by Service: Extract logs from multiple services deployed in Liferay Cloud. By default, Webserver, Database, Backup, Liferay, and Search, as well as those from custom apps deployed as Services within the PaaS or client extensions within the SaaS.
2. Customizable Time Range: The script can be configured to download logs from a specific time period, for example, yesterday.
3. Error handling: The script will be sensitive to errors that occur during the download and will store them in a separate log file for later analysis.
4. Automatic compression: After downloading the logs, it compresses them into a ZIP file for easy storage and transportation.
5. Execution Time: The script measures how long the download and storage takes, giving you a clear idea of ​​the duration of the process on a daily basis.

How to use the script?

1. Environment preparation:
   1. Make sure you have access to the Liferay Cloud API (liferay.cloud) using the LCP CLI
   2. It is recommended to create a dedicated local user for this task in the project and cloud environment, with the GUEST role, to limit access to it. This user and its credentials will be used within the script to connect to the API. 

2. Script Configuration: Modify the variables in the script to suit all of them for your environment:

   • PROJECT_ID: Liferay Cloud project ID
   • ENVIRONMENT: Environment to extract logs. Normally prd.
   • SERVICES: Services list to retrieve logs. It depends if you are on SaaS or PaaS project.
   • LCP_USER y LCP_PASSWORD: User credentials I recommended before to be created with Guest role.
   • LOG_DIR: Folder to store the zip output.
3. Script Execution: The script is designed for daily extraction of log files from the previous day in full, so in a Linux environment it will be possible to schedule it daily using crontab and a cron expression that runs the script at 00:00 daily:
   
   0 0 * * * /path/to/script/log_downloader.sh

Where to find it?

You can get it from my Github repository and contribute whatever you see necessary that could be helpful.
In order to make it as intuitive as possible, for SaaS you can use this one and for PaaS this other one, where only the list of default Services to which you will have access to download the logs changes.