filebeat ^#2

By solutions-qa
stable

Supports: xenial trusty bionic focal

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.

Overview

Filebeat is 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 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 will ship any container logs present in /var/lib/docker/containers as well as 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.

Upgrading filebeat

Upgrades are handled at both the charm and apt repository levels. Use upgrade-charm to get the latest charm code on all filebeat units:

juju upgrade-charm filebeat

Apt repositories are scanned any time the install_sources config changes. If a new version of filebeat is found in the configured repository, juju status will instruct operators to run the reinstall action. This action must be run on each filebeat unit:

juju run-action --wait filebeat/0 reinstall

The reinstall action will stop the filebeat service, purge the apt package, and reinstall the latest version available from the configured repository.

Scale Out Usage

As a subordinate charm, filebeat will scale when additional principal units are added. For example, adding ubuntu units that are related to filebeat will automatically install and configure filebeat for the new unit(s).

juju add-unit ubuntu

To monitor additional applications, simply relate the filebeat subordinate:

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

Contact Information

elasticsearch-charmers@lists.launchpad.net

Community / Help

Juju Discourse

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/6.7/filebeat-input-log.html#filebeat-input-log-exclude-files"; ["/filebeat.*", ".*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/6.7/filebeat-input-log.html#filebeat-input-log-exclude-lines"; []
extra_inputs: (string) A YAML list which will be injected to define additional prospectors/inputs.
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) Elastic Beats apt repository key; D88E42B4
install_sources: (string) Elastic Beats apt repository; deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/6.x/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.; %{[type]}
kafka_topics: (string) Expert setting topics filter.
kafka_version: (string) Expert setting kafka version.
kube_logs: (boolean) Whether or not to include the Kubernetes audit log as well as any K8s metadata when container logs are present on the system: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/6.7/add-kubernetes-metadata.html Note: this option has no effect when related to a non Charmed Kubernetes charm.
log_level: (string) Beats log level. One of debug, info, warning, error, or critical: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/5.6/configuration-logging.html#level; info
logging_to_syslog: (boolean) Send beats logs to syslog: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/5.6/configuration-logging.html#_to_syslog; 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