Export AEM As cloud service logs to third party systems

Leveraging Grafana for Reporting AEM as a Cloud Service Logs

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service provides developers and operations teams with scalable, cloud-native digital experience management capabilities. While AEM offers built-in logging and monitoring via Adobe Cloud Manager and Cloud Console, teams often seek more powerful and customizable observability options—especially when managing multiple environments or integrating logs with broader DevOps toolchains.

In this article, we’ll explore how AEM as a Cloud Service logs can be piped into Grafana for advanced reporting and monitoring, and discuss the advantages this integration brings.

Understanding AEM as a Cloud Service Logging

AEM as a Cloud Service generates various types of logs across its Author, Publish, and Dispatcher layers. These logs include:

-Access logs
-Error logs
-Request logs
-Custom application logs

These logs are accessible via Adobe's Cloud Console and Developer Console, and can be streamed using Adobe’s Log Forwarding feature, which supports integrations with external tools via a log shipping pipeline.

 Integrating AEM Logs with Grafana

To bring AEM logs into Grafana, the typical architecture involves shipping logs to a time-series database or a log aggregation layer that Grafana can query. Here's how you can set it up:

 1. Enable Log Forwarding in AEM Cloud Manager

Adobe supports forwarding logs to external systems using supported protocols like:

-HTTP/S
-Syslog
-Amazon S3
-Azure Blob Storage
-Elasticsearch

For Grafana, you’ll usually integrate through Elasticsearch, Loki, or Prometheus—all of which are compatible with Grafana as data sources.

 2. Set Up a Log Aggregator (e.g., Loki)

Grafana Loki is a log aggregation system that works seamlessly with Grafana. You can configure an intermediary service (like Fluentd, Logstash, or Filebeat) to:

* Ingest logs from AEM (via HTTP or S3)
* Transform and enrich logs as needed
* Push them into Loki

Alternatively, if you're using Elasticsearch, logs can be sent there directly and Grafana can be configured to query Elasticsearch indexes.

 3. Configure Grafana Dashboards

Once logs are ingested:

* Add your data source (Loki or Elasticsearch) in Grafana.
* Create dashboards to visualize:

  * Error trends over time
  * Request volume and latencies
  * Application-level logging metrics
  * Custom alerts and thresholds

Grafana’s templating and alerting features allow for deep customization, real-time analysis, and proactive monitoring.

 Advantages of Using Grafana for AEM Logs

 ✅ Centralized Monitoring

Grafana allows you to unify logs from AEM with logs from other systems (e.g., CDN, database, Kubernetes clusters), giving you a holistic view of application performance and infrastructure health.

 ✅ Powerful Visualizations

Grafana excels at creating visually rich dashboards with interactive graphs, heatmaps, and tables. This helps in faster root cause analysis and decision-making.

 ✅ Custom Alerts

You can set up alerts based on log patterns—such as increased error rates, specific error codes, or custom keywords—to notify teams via email, Slack, or PagerDuty.

 ✅ Improved Troubleshooting

With structured logging and centralized dashboards, developers and SREs can quickly trace issues across environments, reducing MTTR (Mean Time To Resolution).

✅ Overcoming AEM Cloud limitation of holding logs for limited number of days

Usually in AEM as cloud we can download logs of specific number of days. If we want to debug the logs beyond the limit of AEM cloud, we can use Graphana loaded logs since it holds the logs based on our settings.

 ✅ Scalability & Flexibility

Grafana supports multiple data sources and can scale with your needs. Whether you're operating one AEM instance or dozens across geographies, it adapts with minimal overhead.


 Final Thoughts

Bringing AEM as a Cloud Service logs into Grafana unlocks advanced observability and empowers teams to proactively monitor, analyze, and optimize digital experiences. With the right log forwarding setup and dashboard design, you can transform raw logs into actionable insights—leading to better performance, reduced downtime, and happier users.

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