How to forward logs to external collector

[Marta Gina Coscia]

Hi all,

I need to collect pods and cluster logs of my okd cluster and forward them to an external collector.

From the documentation it is required to use a Redhat pull secret to enable Redhat-operators catalog on OKD and configure RedHat Openshift Cluster Logging.

https://docs.okd.io/latest/logging/cluster-logging-deploying.html

The questions are:

1.) My cluster is OKD, community cluster, what happens if I enable the  Redhat-operators catalog? Do I need to pay for it?

2.) Is there a way to configure a cluster log forwarder without Operators?

Regards,

Marta

[Kai-Uwe Rommel]

It is not entirely clear but most people would tend to say that you would need to have a subscription.

I have seen other people use alternative solutions, such as fluentbit together with OpenSearch. I have not yet done this myself.

In OperatorHub I have seen the community based Logging Operator from Opstree which apparently can also be used to deploy the traditional components Elasticsearch, Fluentd and Kibana, much like Red Hat's Loging Operator.

I have also not used this myself yet. But I am also currently collecting information about such alternative solutions for a community products based logging stack.

[Brett Tofel]

The Cluster Logging Operator is in the Red Hat paid catalog and I didn't immediately see it in the Community catalog. But top of the README.MD here (https://github.com/openshift/cluster-logging-operator) it says it is the OKD logging solution. You could for sure simply install from a clone of that repo. But you ought to be able to do this with OLM as well...