View CloudWatch logs

Access to CloudWatch

You must be on-boarded to GovWifi’s AWS account in order to access CloudWatch logs.

Please speak to the GovWifi reliability engineers or the delivery manager about this process.

Logging in to CloudWatch

Log in to GovWifi AWS via the gds-cli or the AWS console.

You must be on the VPN to log in.

CLI login

Ensure gds-cli is configured on your laptop and your AWS credentials are set up. Note: it may be aliased to ‘gds’

Then run:

$ gds aws govwifi -l

Using the AWS service search bar, navigate to the CloudWatch service section.

Console login

1. Log in to the AWS console
2. Navigate to CloudWatch
3. Choose “Log groups” from the “Logs” sidebar. You can also use “Insights” which is a log aggregation tool in CloudWatch.

You can read more about the CloudWatch Insights query DSL here.

CloudWatch logs

CloudWatch contains unstructured system and application logs for GovWifi’s APIs and infrastructure components.

Since the service is region-based, make sure you’re reviewing logs for the correct region by selecting the relevant region from the AWS service bar.

Application log types

The application log group naming is inconsistent. It roughly uses the following convention:

<environment>-<service>-log-group

Service/API	Environment	Log group
FreeRADIUS	Staging	frontend
	Production	frontend
Admin	Staging	staging-admin-log-group
	Production	wifi-admin-log-group
Authentication	Staging	staging-authentication-api-docker-log-group
	Production	wifi-authentication-api-docker-logs
User Sign-up	Staging	staging-user-signup-api-docker-log-group
	Production	wifi-user-signup-api-docker-log-group
Logging	Staging	staging-logging-api-docker-log-group
	Production	wifi-logging-api-docker-log-group
Grafana	Staging	staging-grafana-log-group
	Production	wifi-grafana-log-group
Prometheus	Staging	staging-prometheus-log-group
	Production	wifi-prometheus-log-group

Note:

• “Production” is referred to as “wifi” throughout the infrastructure. So wifi-admin-log-group refers to the Production Admin API log group.
• We have deprecated the -frontend-docker-log-group groups since moving the Frontend ECS clusters from EC2 instances to ECS Fargate.

System log types

System logs for EC2 instances follow a separate pattern:

<environment>-<instance name>/var/log/<log-type.log>

EC2 instance	Environment	Log group
Bastion	Staging	staging-bastion/var/log/*
	Production	wifi-bastion/var/log/*
Frontend ECS cluster	Staging	staging/var/log/*
	Production	wifi/var/log/*

Note: The Frontend ECS clusters run on Fargate and follow this naming pattern: /aws/ecs/containerinsights/frontend-fargate/*

This page was last reviewed on 15 November 2024. It needs to be reviewed again on 15 May 2025 by the page owner #govwifi .