Manage Entities

An entity is a resource in Log Analytics which is used to reference the real asset on your on-premises host or virtual host. After you discover this entity in Log Analytics, you can associate it with a log source and enable log collection from it.

Useful Resources:

• To know more about an entity, see Log Analytics Terms and Concepts.

• To create an entity, see Create an Entity to Represent Your Log-Emitting Resource. Further, Log Analytics enables you to edit it at a later time, move it from one compartment to another, and perform several other management tasks as listed below.

• To initiate the discovery of entities like packaged applications, databases, middleware, and other components, see Auto-Discovery of Entities and Log Collection.

• An entity must have an entity type. Nearly 100 Oracle-defined entity types are already available. See Entity Types Modeled in Log Analytics. You can also create custom entity types. When an entity is created, an entity type defines the properties which are used to locate the log files location. For example, in an Oracle Database entity type, you must provide path values for properties such as ADR_HOME, ORACLE_HOME, and INSTALL_HOME. You can create new entity types using REST API or CLI. See Log Analytics API and Command Line Reference.

• When you use Management Agents to continuously collect logs, you must configure a source-entity association to enable a source for specific entities to collect the log data. See Manage Source-Entity Association.

• To stop the log collection from an entity, dissociate the entity from the source. See Stop Log Collection from an Entity.

To perform other actions on the entity, in the Entities page, select the compartment of your entity and narrow down your search for your entity by selecting the entity type in the search bar. After identifying your entity, click Actions icon in the row of your entity:

• View Details: The entity page is displayed. In the Entity Information tab, you can view the entity type, its OCID, creation type, the compartment that it resides in, the details of the management agent, the time that it was created and last updated, and the associated sources. Click the Edit icon next to Management Agent to update the agent information. In the Tags tab, you can view the tags associated with the entity. Click Add Tag button to add one.

  Further, click the Edit, Move Resource, Add Tags, or Delete button in the entity page to perform the corresponding actions.

• Edit: The Edit Entity dialog box is displayed. Here, to add more properties, you can click Add button in the Properties section and specify the Property Name and Property Value. Click Save Changes.

  These properties are used to locate the log files location. For example, in an Oracle Database entity type, you must provide path values for properties such as ADR_HOME, ORACLE_HOME, and INSTALL_HOME.

• Add Data: The Configure Agent-based Log Collection or Configure log collection for OCI resources dialog box is displayed depending on whether the entity is an OCI resource or non-OCI resource. The wizards assists you in associating the entity with a suitable source. This sets up the parser and filter to process the log records flowing from the entity.

• Upload Files: The Upload Files wizard opens. Follow the steps in the wizard to upload log files associated with the entity. This is particularly useful to upload a batch of files that are not part of continuous log collection or those that belong to a time range outside of what is defined for collection.

• Copy OCID: The OCID of the entity resource is copied. You can use it to refer to this resource anywhere in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

• Move Resource: The Move Resource to a Different Compartment dialog box is displayed. From the options, select the compartment to which you want to move the entity and click Move Resource.

• Add Tag: See Add Tags to Log Analytics Resources.

• Delete: You may have to delete some of your old or unused entities to conform to the service limits of Log Analytics. See Limits by Service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation. To delete the entity, confirm in the Delete Entity dialog box.

  Note
  
  

  The entities that you deleted using the entity delete API may reappear in your entity listing in any of the following circumstances:

  • New logs are pushed for the deleted entities through Service Connector Hub or Object Storage collections.

  • New EM Bridge uploads contain the deleted entity.