View and export application instance logs

Learn how to view and export logs for your GCP and AWS cloud apps
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Prior reading: Cloud apps overview

Purpose: This document provides detailed instructions for viewing logs for your Workbench cloud app.

Introduction

Workbench users can view and export application instance logs for AWS and GCP cloud apps via the Workbench UI and the Workbench CLI.

How to use logs

It can be particularly helpful to refer to application instance logs for debugging custom container failures and diagnosing runtime or performance issues. They can also be useful if you're seeing "out of memory" errors or if a custom app is failing to start.

The following types of logs are available to view:

  • Application logs: Docker logs from the application-server container running JupyterLab, R Analysis Environment, or your custom application
  • Startup logs: Logs pertaining to setting up the application-server container
  • System logs: systemd unit logs
  • VM statistics: Memory and disk usage

You can use the text filter to search by log name to retrieve specific log streams:

  • Application logs: vm.docker
  • Startup logs: vm.journal.startup
  • System logs: vm.journal., e.g., vm.journal.idle-shutdown.service
  • VM statstics: vm.journal.stats

View and export logs

  1. From a workspace, navigate to the Apps tab to see your cloud apps. Click the three-dot icon in the upper-right corner of a cloud app card and select View logs. An App logs dialog will open.

    A cloud app card in the Workbench UI with the View logs option highlighted.
    Select View logs from the cloud app card.

  2. Adjust the query filters by date/time, text, and/or severity and click Query. Relevant logs will appear below.

    App logs dialog showing logs based off of selected time and severity filters.
    Filter logs by time and date, text, and/or severity.

  3. If you'd like, you can export the logs to a controlled bucket in your workspace. Click Save logs in the lower right and select a bucket to export to. Click Export.

Use the wb app logs command to run logs-related actions.

In the examples below, replace the options with relevant values. For the --start-time and --end-time options, values must be in UTC.

# Query for logs
wb app logs \
--workspace=my-workspace \
--id=my-app \
--start-time=2026-04-30T19:04:19.234Z \
--end-time=2026-04-30T20:04:19.234Z \
--format=JSON

# Query with relative time
wb app logs \
--workspace=my-workspace \
--id=my-app \
--format=JSON \
--since=5d

# Query with text filter
wb app logs \
--since=5d \
--workspace=my-workspace \
--id=my-app \
--format=JSON \
--filter="vm.journal.startup"

# Export to bucket. The --output-bucket must be a controlled bucket in the same workspace as your app.
wb app logs \
--since=5d \
--workspace=my-workspace \
--id=my-app \
--format=JSON \
--filter="vm.journal.startup" \
--output-bucket=my-bucket

Last Modified: 11 May 2026