Filebeat Configuration

A log shipper designed for files.

Filebeat is an open source shipping agent that lets you ship logs from local files to one or more destinations, including Logstash.

Step 1 - Install Filebeat

To get started first follow the steps below:

Install
Root access
Verify the required port is open

Older versions can be found here 7, 6, 5

Step 2 - Update your configuration file

The configuration file below is pre-configured to send data to your Logit.io Stack via Logstash.

Copy the configuration file below and overwrite the contents of filebeat.yml.

# ============================== Filebeat modules ==============================
filebeat.config.modules:
  path: ${path.config}/modules.d/*.yml
  reload.enabled: false
  #reload.period: 10s

# ================================== Outputs ===================================
# ------------------------------ Logstash Output -------------------------------
output.logstash:
    hosts: ["your-logstash-host:your-ssl-port"]
    loadbalance: true
    ssl.enabled: true

# ================================= Processors =================================
processors:
  - add_host_metadata:
      when.not.contains.tags: forwarded
  - add_cloud_metadata: ~
  - add_docker_metadata: ~
  - add_kubernetes_metadata: ~

If you’re running Filebeat 7 add this code block to the end. Otherwise, you can leave it out.

# ... For Filebeat 7 only ...
filebeat.registry.path: /var/lib/filebeat

If you’re running Filebeat 6 add this code block to the end. Otherwise, you can leave it out.

# ... For Filebeat 6 only ...
registry_file: /var/lib/filebeat/registry

Validate your YAML

It’s a good idea to run the configuration file through a YAML validator to rule out indentation errors, clean up extra characters, and check if your YAML file is valid. Yamllint.com is a great choice.

Step 3 - Configure Modules (Optional)

Depending on your data source, Filebeat provides pre-configured modules and dashboards. The following data sources have Filebeat modules available to use straight away -

Apache, Auditd, Elasticsearch, HAproxy, IIS, Kafka, Kibana, Logstash, Mongodb, MySQL, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Redis, System, Traefik

Step 4 - Validate configuration

If you have issues starting in the next step, you can use these commands below to troubleshoot.

Let's check the configuration file is syntactically correct by running directly inside the terminal. If the file is invalid, will print an error loading config file error message with details on how to correct the problem.

deb/rpm

sudo  -e -c /etc//.yml

macOS

cd <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>
sudo ./ -e -c .yml

Windows

cd <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>
.\.exe -e -c .yml

Step 5 - Start filebeat

Start or restart to apply the configuration changes.

Step 6 - Check Logit.io for your logs

Now you should view your logs:

Launch Dashboard

If you don't see logs take a look at How to diagnose no data in Stack below for how to diagnose common issues.

Step 7 - How to diagnose no data in Stack

If you don't see data appearing in your Stack after following the steps, visit the Help Centre guide for steps to diagnose no data appearing in your Stack or Chat to support now.

Step 8 - Filebeat Logging Overview

Filebeat is the most popular way to send logs to ELK due to its reliability & minimal memory footprint. It is the leading Beat out of the entire collection of open-source shipping tools, including Auditbeat, Metricbeat & Heartbeat.

Filebeat's origins begin from combining key features from Logstash-Forwarder & Lumberjack & is written in Go. Within the logging pipeline, Filebeat can generate, parse, tail & forward common logs to be indexed within Elasticsearch. The harvester is often compared to Logstash but it is not a suitable replacement & instead should be used in tandem for most use cases.

Earlier versions of Filebeat suffered from a very limited scope & only allowed the user to send events to Logstash & Elasticsearch. More recent versions of the shipper have been updated to be compatible with Redis & Kafka.

A misconfigured Filebeat setup can lead to many complex logging concerns that this filebeat.yml wizard aims to solve. Just a couple of examples of these include excessively large registry files & file handlers that error frequently when encountering deleted or renamed log files. Tracking numerous pipelines using this shipper can become tedious for self hosted Elastic Stacks so you may wish to consider our Hosted ELK service as a solution to this.

If you need any further assistance with migrating your log data to ELK we're here to help you get started. Feel free to get in contact with our support team by sending us a message via live chat & we'll be happy to assist.

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