The Ultimate Guide to GCP’s Logging Query Language

How to build queries that analyze Cloud Logging data.

Zach Quinn
Pipeline: Your Data Engineering Resource

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Photo by Atlas Kadrów on Unsplash

A Meta Query Language

LQL can be used in the Logs Explorer to fetch real-time data on Google Cloud products like Cloud Functions and Virtual Machines as well as non-GCP resources like resources connected to Amazon Web Services’ accounts.

If you’ve never accessed the Logs Explorer within your GCP project, you can navigate to the Logs Explorer in the GCP console and then build queries either manually or by clicking to enable various filters.

If you are simply seeking broad information on resources like cloud functions, then it’s likely that your activity will be confined to the Logs Explorer UI and the query pane.

The query pane enables click-based operations such as:

  • Searching for text strings across specific fields
  • Toggling options from within the filter menus
  • Composing more advanced queries using LQL
  • Query execution operations (view, run, edit, save, etc.)

Building Logging Queries

Once your queries become more specific, it is likely you’ll need to move beyond the constraints of the LQL…

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