Is it possible to rename an AWS CloudWatch Log Group?

5
votes

I have created an AWS CloudWatch log group with a name which was not very future proof. Is it possible to rename such a log group? I could find no option to do this via the CloudWatch console.

I guess an alternative would be to export the content of the log group, create a new log group with the desired name, and then re-consume the exported logs to the new log group. I would prefer to avoid this approach though, as (apart from being tedious) this would reset the ingestionTime of all the log events in the log group.

2
amazon-web-servicesamazon-cloudwatchamazon-cloudwatchlogs

2 Answers

4
votes

It does not seem to be possible at the current time. The AWS CLI only lists the following log-group-related actions at this time:

  • create-log-group
  • delete-log-group
  • describe-log-groups
  • list-tags-log-group
  • tag-log-group
  • untag-log-group

My solution, since the log-group was only recently created and all the original log files were still on the EC2 instance, was to:

  1. stop the CloudWatch Logs agent on the EC2 instance with $ /etc/init.d/awslogs stop.
  2. ensure the application was not currently running/logging on the EC2 instance
  3. delete the existing log-group on CloudWatch
  4. move the existing log files out of the expected directory on the EC2 instance
  5. edit the file /var/awslogs/etc/awslogs.conf on the EC2 instance to specify the desired log group name instead of the previous one.
  6. start the CloudWatch Logs agent on the EC2 instance with $ /etc/init.d/awslogs start.
  7. move each log file back into the expected directory on the EC2 instance, one at a time, from the earliest to the latest (in terms of file modification time), so the log agent will process all of them (and not just ignore files with non-latest modification time) and send them to the new log-group.
  8. restart the application on the EC2 instance

Quite the tedious procedure, especially with having to manually move the log files, one at a time, in the correct order. Would be neat if there was functionality in the future to rename a log group.

2
votes

A "solution" ...

Create the new log group. Have the streams write to this log group. Using aws cli get the events for each of the streams for the old log group and then put them to the new group.

I've got about 2,000 streams I'm about to do this too. We restructured are group names.