CloudWatch logging

Enabling CloudWatch logging

CloudWatch logging for EKS control plane is not enabled by default due to data ingestion and storage costs.

To enable control plane logging when cluster is created, you will need to define cloudWatch.clusterLogging.enableTypes setting in your ClusterConfig (see below for examples).

So if you have a config file with correct cloudWatch.clusterLogging.enableTypes setting, you can create a cluster with eksctl create cluster --config-file=<path>.

If you have created a cluster already, you can use eksctl utils update-cluster-logging.

Note

this command runs in plan mode by default, you will need to specify --approve flag to apply the changes to your cluster.

If you are using a config file, run:

eksctl utils update-cluster-logging --config-file=<path>

Alternatively, you can use CLI flags.

To enable all types of logs, run:

eksctl utils update-cluster-logging --enable-types all

To enable audit logs, run:

eksctl utils update-cluster-logging --enable-types audit

To enable all but controllerManager logs, run:

eksctl utils update-cluster-logging --enable-types=all --disable-types=controllerManager

If the api and scheduler log types were already enabled, to disable scheduler and enable controllerManager at the same time, run:

eksctl utils update-cluster-logging --enable-types=controllerManager --disable-types=scheduler

This will leave api and controllerManager as the only log types enabled.

To disable all types of logs, run:

eksctl utils update-cluster-logging --disable-types all

ClusterConfig Examples

There 5 types of logs that you may wish to enable (see EKS documentation for more details):

• api
• audit
• authenticator
• controllerManager
• scheduler

You can enable all types with "*" or "all", i.e.:

cloudWatch:
  clusterLogging:
    enableTypes: ["*"]

To disable all types, use [] or remove cloudWatch section completely.

You can enable a subset of types by listing the types you want to enable:

cloudWatch:
  clusterLogging:
    enableTypes:
      - "audit"
      - "authenticator"

Full example:

apiVersion: eksctl.io/v1alpha5
kind: ClusterConfig

metadata:
  name: cluster-11
  region: eu-west-2

nodeGroups:
  - name: ng-1
    instanceType: m5.large
    desiredCapacity: 1

cloudWatch:
  clusterLogging:
    enableTypes: ["audit", "authenticator"]