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Logs help you investigate activity and troubleshoot issues across supported DigitalOcean resources. You can search and filter log entries, inspect structured attributes, and adjust the time range and refresh interval to monitor recent events.

Enable Insights During Resource Creation

After you opt in to the public preview, you can enable the available Insights telemetry from the resource creation page when you create a supported DigitalOcean resource. For Droplets and GPU Droplets, select Install the Observability agent to install the agent during resource creation. This enables logs and trace data for the resource, which you can disable later if needed.

For supported managed resources that do not require the Observability agent, the resource creation page displays the available logs and traces options directly. When creating Managed Agents resources, Insights is enabled by default.

View Logs Using the Control Panel

Use the Logs tab to select a region and time range, filter log data, and inspect individual log entries.

To view logs, go to the DigitalOcean Control Panel, in the left menu, click DATA & LEARNING, click Insights, and then click the Logs tab.

Set the Region

At the top of the Logs tab, click the Region dropdown menu to select the region whose logs you want to view. Log queries return data from one region at a time.

Set the Time Range and Refresh Interval

The time range, timezone, and refresh interval apply to the logs displayed on the Logs tab.

Set the Time Range

To set the time range, in the top-right corner, click the Time range dropdown menu to select a relative range from Last 5 minutes through Last 7 days, or specify an absolute From and To range.

Use the Timezone field to select the timezone used to display metric timestamps. The default is your local browser timezone.

Set the Refresh Interval

To set the refresh interval, in the top-right corner, click the Refresh interval dropdown menu to select Off, 15 sec, 30 sec, or 60 sec.

Click the refresh icon to refresh the metric data immediately.

Filter Logs

The Logs tab displays logs from supported resources. Use the Filters panel on the left to narrow the results by severity and other available fields. To the right, the results area displays the number of matching logs, a chart of log volume by severity, and a list of log entries. Each entry includes its Timestamp, ServiceName, SeverityText, and Body.

Select one or more checkboxes within a filter section to narrow the results. Click Clear to remove selections from that section, or click Clear all filters to remove all applied filters.

View a Log Entry

You can find a log entry by entering its Body, Service Name, or Resource Type in the search field. To view the entry, click > on the left side of the entry. The expanded entry contains the following tabs:

• Overview displays the log body and attributes. Use Filter attributes… to search for the attributes you need to see. For example, SpanId.

  If available, click Span Details or Trace Details to open the related trace in the Traces tab. To share the trace, click Share trace in the top-right corner to copy a shareable URL to your clipboard. Click View all logs to open the Logs tab and view all logs associated with the trace.

  You can add the value to your filters by clicking + Add to filters.

  You can add the value as a column in your logs by clicking + Add Column. You can also remove it by clicking - Remove Column, if needed.

  You can copy the value on the right of it by clicking Copy Value.

• JSON displays the structured data, including its timestamp, trace and span IDs, parent span ID, span name and kind, service name, duration, status code, and status message. If available, expand attributes to inspect their contents.

View Logs Using Automation

To view logs via the API, send a request to the Search Logs endpoint with the region and search criteria.

curl -X POST \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "time_range": {
      "from": {"absolute": "2026-09-30T00:00:00Z"},
      "to": {"absolute": "2026-09-30T01:00:00Z"}
    },
    "filter": {
      "condition": {
        "field": {"name": "severity_text"},
        "operator": "FILTER_OPERATOR_EQ",
        "value": {"string_value": "Error"}
      }
    },
    "order_by": [
      {"field": {"name": "timestamp"}, "direction": "SORT_DIRECTION_DESC"}
    ],
    "pagination": {"limit": 100}
  }' \
  "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/insights/query/nyc3/logs/search"