startQuery

Starts a query of one or more log groups using CloudWatch Logs Insights. You specify the log groups and time range to query and the query string to use.

For more information, see CloudWatch Logs Insights Query Syntax.

After you run a query using StartQuery, the query results are stored by CloudWatch Logs. You can use GetQueryResults to retrieve the results of a query, using the queryId that StartQuery returns.

To specify the log groups to query, a StartQuery operation must include one of the following:

• Either exactly one of the following parameters: logGroupName, logGroupNames, or logGroupIdentifiers

• Or the queryString must include a SOURCE command to select log groups for the query. The SOURCE command can select log groups based on log group name prefix, account ID, and log class. For more information about the SOURCE command, see SOURCE. If you have associated a KMS key with the query results in this account, then StartQuery uses that key to encrypt the results when it stores them. If no key is associated with query results, the query results are encrypted with the default CloudWatch Logs encryption method.

Queries time out after 60 minutes of runtime. If your queries are timing out, reduce the time range being searched or partition your query into a number of queries.

If you are using CloudWatch cross-account observability, you can use this operation in a monitoring account to start a query in a linked source account. For more information, see CloudWatch cross-account observability. For a cross-account StartQuery operation, the query definition must be defined in the monitoring account.

You can have up to 30 concurrent CloudWatch Logs insights queries, including queries that have been added to dashboards.