- Jan 07, 2021 Ingesting logs. Kibana, the visualization and administrative interface for the Elastic Stack, you’ll find instructions for the installation of Filebeat, which we’ll use to ingest the Azure activity, sign-in, and/or audit logs mentioned earlier.
- Filebeat Output. This section in the Filebeat configuration file defines where you want to ship the data to. There is a wide range of supported output options, including console, file, cloud.
Dec 07, 2018 Filebeats is light weight application where as Logstash is a big heavy application with correspondingly richer feature set. HOW Filebeat has been made highly configurable to enable it to handle a large variety of log formats. I have filebeats 5.x ship logs to logstash. How do I reset the “file pointer” in filebeat. This is a similar problem to. How to force Logstash to reparse a file?
This tutorial on using Filebeat to ingest apache logs will show you how to create a working system in a jiffy. I will not go into minute details since I want to keep this post simple and sweet. I will just show the bare minimum which needs to be done to make the system work.
WHY
Apache logs are everywhere. Even Buzz LightYear knew that.
And then there is a growing user base of people who are increasingly using ELK stack to handle the logs. Sooner or later you will end up with Apache logs which you will want to push into the Elasticsearch cluster.
There are two popular ways of getting the logs in Elasticsearch cluster. Filebeats and Logstash. Filebeats is light weight application where as Logstash is a big heavy application with correspondingly richer feature set.
HOW
Filebeat has been made highly configurable to enable it to handle a large variety of log formats. In real world however there are a few industry standard log formats which are very common. So to make life easier filebeat comes with modules. Each standard logging format has its own module. All you have to do is to enable it. No messing around in the config files, no need to handle edge cases. Everything has been handled. Since I am using filebeat to ingest apache logs I will enable the apache2 module.
First install and start Elasticsearch and Kibana. Then you have to install some plugins.
Filebeats Logstash
Then install the filebeats.
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 | # Access logs enabled:true # Set custom paths for the log files. If left empty, # Filebeat will choose the paths depending on your OS. error: # Set custom paths for the log files. If left empty, # Filebeat will choose the paths depending on your OS. |
Best practice is to leave it as it is and let filebeat figure out the location based on OS you are using. And I will do the same.
With that done the next command to run is
Setup makes sure that the mapping of the fields in Elasticsearch is right for the fields which are present in the given log.
Before we start using filebeat to ingest apache logs we should check if things are ok. Use this command:
You want to see all OK there.
Once that is done then run the filebeat.
To stop it
However since I do not have apache server running I downloaded some logs for demo purpose. And I will pass them at command line. Hence I need to run the filebeat in foreground.