filebeat #0
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.
- Tags:
- logging ›
- monitoring ›
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 the elk stack, so we can visualize our log data once we've established the link between Filebeat and Logstash
juju deploy ~containers/bundle/elk-stack
juju deploy ubuntu
juju deploy ~containers/trusty/filebeat
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 your data thats being shipped to ElasticSearch you can simply deploy the 'beats-base' bundle which stands up Elasticsearch, Kibana, and the three known working Beats subordinate services.
juju deploy ~containers/bundle/beats-core
juju deploy ubuntu
juju add-relation filebeat:beats-host ubuntu
juju add-relation topbeat:beats-host ubuntu
juju add-relation packetbeat:beats-host ubuntu
A note about the beats-host relationship
The Beats suite of charms leverage the implicit "juju-info" relation interface which is special and unique in the context of subordinates. This is what allows us to relate the beat to any host, but may have some display oddities in the juju-gui. Until this is resolved, it's recommended to relate beats to their principal services using the CLI
Changing whats being 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 set-config filebeat logpath /var/log/mylog.log
Testing the deployment
The services provide extended status reporting to indicate when they are ready:
juju status --format=tabular
This is particularly useful when combined with watch to track the on-going progress of the deployment:
watch -n 0.5 juju status --format=tabular
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
open 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 services:
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
- Charles Butler <charles.butler@canonical.com>
- Matt Bruzek <matthew.bruzek@canonical.com>
Need Help?
Configuration
- extra_packages
- (string) Space separated list of extra deb packages to install.
- 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
- logpath
- (string) Space separated log paths to monitor. Can contain wildcards.
- /var/log/*.log /var/log/*/*.log
- 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