# Accessing MariaDB error logs
<a name="USER_LogAccess.MariaDB.Errorlog"></a>

The MariaDB error log is written to the `<host-name>.err` file. You can view this file by using the Amazon RDS console, You can also retrieve the log using the Amazon RDS API, Amazon RDS CLI, or AWS SDKs. The `<host-name>.err` file is flushed every 5 minutes, and its contents are appended to `mysql-error-running.log`. The `mysql-error-running.log` file is then rotated every hour and the hourly files generated during the last 24 hours are retained. Each log file has the hour it was generated (in UTC) appended to its name. The log files also have a timestamp that helps you determine when the log entries were written.

MariaDB writes to the error log only on startup, shutdown, and when it encounters errors. A DB instance can go hours or days without new entries being written to the error log. If you see no recent entries, it's because the server did not encounter an error that resulted in a log entry.