Question

A financial services company centralizes all application and audit logs in Cloud Logging. Their compliance team requires that audit logs be retained for 7 years and remain queryable within Cloud Logging, while high-volume debug logs from development workloads only need 14 days of retention to minimize cost. The platform team wants to manage these retention differences without exporting logs to external systems or writing custom deletion scripts. What should they do?

Accepted Answer

Route audit logs to a dedicated log bucket with a 7-year custom retention period, and route debug logs to a separate log bucket with a 14-day retention period using log sinks with inclusion filters.

Answer

Keep all logs in the _Default log bucket and set its retention to 7 years, then create a scheduled Cloud Function to delete debug log entries older than 14 days.

Answer

Export all logs to Cloud Storage buckets and apply Object Lifecycle Management rules to enforce the different retention windows for each log type.

Answer

Export audit logs to BigQuery with a 7-year table expiration and keep debug logs only in the _Required bucket, relying on its default retention.