A NodeJS application to demonstrate how to write HTTP Request logs from a backend Express application hosted on a Compute Engine VM to GCP Cloud Logging (AKA Stackdriver)
Create a .env file by copying the preset variable names from .env-example
cp .env-example .env
Use your pre-exising Project ID and Sink name for PROJECT_ID and LOG_NAME, respectively (The default Sink is _Default).
If you want to include the VM instance's name and ID in the logs as well, you can run the following commands from your VM to find them:
INSTANCE_NAME=$(curl -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google" http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/instance/hostname)
INSTANCE_ID=$(curl -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google" http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/instance/id)
Install the dependencies and start the server
npm i
npm run start
ℹ️ : Ensure that the VM service account has the roles roles/logging.logWriter and roles/monitoring.metricWriter. These are present on the Default Compute Engine service account.