filebeat #20

Supports: xenial trusty

Description

As the next-generation Logstash Forwarder, Filebeat tails logs and quickly sends this information to Logstash for further parsing and enrichment or to Elasticsearch for centralized storage and analysis.

Filebeat

A lightweight, open source shipper for log file data. As the next-generation Logstash Forwarder, Filebeat tails logs and quickly sends this information to Logstash for further parsing and enrichment or to Elasticsearch for centralized storage and analysis.

Usage

Filebeat can be added to any principal charm thanks to the wonders of being a subordinate charm. The following usage example will deploy an ubuntu log source along with the elk stack so we can visualize our log data.

juju deploy ~elasticsearch-charmers/bundle/elk-stack
juju deploy xenial/filebeat
juju deploy xenial/ubuntu
juju add-relation filebeat:beats-host ubuntu
juju add-relation filebeat logstash

Deploying the minimal Beats formation

If you do not need log buffering and alternate transforms on data that is being shipped to ElasticSearch, you can simply deploy the 'beats-core' bundle which stands up Elasticsearch, Kibana, and the known working Beats subordinate applications.

juju deploy ~containers/bundle/beats-core
juju deploy xenial/ubuntu
juju add-relation filebeat:beats-host ubuntu
juju add-relation topbeat:beats-host ubuntu

Changing what is shipped

By default, the Filebeat charm is setup to ship everything in:

/var/log/*/*.log
/var/log/*.log

If you'd rather target specific log files:

juju config filebeat logpath /var/log/mylog.log

Testing the deployment

The applications provide extended status reporting to indicate when they are ready:

juju status

This is particularly useful when combined with watch to track the on-going progress of the deployment:

watch juju status

The message for each unit will provide information about that unit's state. Once they all indicate that they are ready, you can navigate to the kibana url and view the streamed log data from the Ubuntu host.

juju status kibana --format=yaml | grep public-address

Navigate to http://<kibana-ip>/ in a browser and begin creating your dashboard visualizations.

Scale Out Usage

This bundle was designed to scale out. To increase the amount of log storage and indexers, you can add-units to elasticsearch.

juju add-unit elasticsearch

You can also increase in multiples, for example: To increase the number of Logstash parser/buffer/shipping units:

juju add-unit -n 2 logstash

To monitor additional hosts, simply relate the Filebeat subordinate:

juju add-relation filebeat:beats-host my-charm

Contact information

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Configuration

exclude_files
(string) A list of regular expressions to match the files that you want Filebeat to ignore. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/5.3/configuration-filebeat-options.html#exclude-files
[".gz$"]
exclude_lines
(string) A list of regular expressions to match the lines that you want Filebeat to exclude. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/5.3/configuration-filebeat-options.html#exclude-lines
[]
extra_packages
(string) Space separated list of extra deb packages to install.
fields
(string) Space seperated list of key:value that the prospector will assign as field to each beat
harvester_buffer_size
(int) Defines the buffer size every harvester uses when fetching the file
16384
install_keys
(string) repository key
D88E42B4
install_sources
(string) apt repository to fetch beats from
deb http://packages.elastic.co/beats/apt stable main
kafka_hosts
(string) A comma separated list of kafka output hosts in addition to those from relations.
kafka_topic
(string) Topic name. Format strings are allowed. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/master/kafka-output.html#_literal_topic_literal
%{[type]}
kafka_topics
(string) Expert setting topics filter. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/master/kafka-output.html#_literal_topics_literal
kube_logs
(boolean) Add a prospector to ship logs from Kubernetes pods
logging_to_syslog
(boolean) Send filebeat logs to syslog https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/master/configuration-logging.html#_literal_to_syslog_literal
True
logpath
(string) Space separated log paths to monitor. Can contain wildcards.
/var/log/*.log /var/log/*/*.log
logstash_hosts
(string) A comma separated list of logstash output hosts in addition to those from relations.
logstash_ssl_cert
(string) Public SSL certificate data (base64 encoded) for connecting securely to logstash.
logstash_ssl_key
(string) Private SSL key data (base64 encoded) for connecting security to logstash.
max_bytes
(int) Maximum number of bytes a single log event can have. Default 10MB
10485760
package_status
(string) The status of service-affecting packages will be set to this value in the dpkg database. Valid values are "install" and "hold".
install