A Linux Compute Engine VM runs multiple apps that write logs to local text files. You want those logs ingested into Cloud Logging. What should you install/configure?

Installing a Google-distributed fluentd agent (also known as the Cloud Logging agent) on the Compute Engine instance is the correct solution. This agent is specifically designed to stream logs from your VM instances to Cloud Logging, including logs from local text files. It offers real-time ingestion and robust configuration options for filtering and parsing. Piping to the Linux Syslog daemon would only handle system-level logs, not arbitrary application logs written to text files, and would still require a mechanism to get those syslog entries into Cloud Logging. Installing a Google-distributed collectd agent is for collecting system metrics, not application logs. Using cron to copy log files to Cloud Storage once a day is inefficient for real-time monitoring and analysis, and doesn't directly ingest them into Cloud Logging for search and alerting.