Kafka

Collect and ship topics from Kafka message queue to Logstash and Elasticsearch

Filebeat is a lightweight shipper that enables you to send your Apache Kafka message queue logs to Logstash and Elasticsearch. Configure Filebeat using the pre-defined examples below to start sending and analysing your Apache Kafka message queue logs.

Step 1 - Install Filebeat

deb (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint)

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat/filebeat-oss-7.8.1-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i filebeat-oss-7.8.1-amd64.deb

rpm (CentOS/RHEL/Fedora)

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat/filebeat-oss-7.8.1-x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -vi filebeat-oss-7.8.1-x86_64.rpm

macOS

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat/filebeat-oss-7.8.1-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzvf filebeat-oss-7.8.1-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz

Windows

Download the filebeat Windows zip file from the official downloads page.
Extract the contents of the zip file into C:\Program Files.
Rename the filebeat-<version>-windows directory to filebeat.
Open a PowerShell prompt as an Administrator (right-click the PowerShell icon and select Run As Administrator). If you are running Windows XP, you may need to download and install PowerShell.
Run the following commands to install filebeat as a Windows service:

cd 'C:\Program Files\filebeat'
.\install-service-filebeat.ps1

If script execution is disabled on your system, you need to set the execution policy for the current session to allow the script to run. For example: PowerShell.exe -ExecutionPolicy UnRestricted -File .\install-service-filebeat.ps1.

My OS isn't here! Don't see your system? Check out the official downloads page for more options (including 32-bit versions).

Step 2 - Locate configuration file

deb/rpm /etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml
win <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>/filebeat.yml

Step 3 - Enable Kafka Input

We need to specify the Kafka input details. In the configuration file locate the filebeat.inputs section and edit your config to look similar to the below.

filebeat.inputs:
- type: kafka
  hosts:
    - name-of-your-broker:your-broker-port
  # - localhost:9092        (Example)
  topics: ["name-of-your-topic", "name-of-another-topic"]
  group_id: "filebeat"

Step 4 - Configure Output

We'll be shipping to Logstash so that we have the option to run filters before the data is indexed.
Comment out the elasticsearch output block.

## Comment out elasticsearch output
#output.elasticsearch:
#  hosts: ["localhost:9200"]

Uncomment and change the logstash output to match below.

output.logstash:
    hosts: ["your-logstash-host:your-ssl-port"]
    loadbalance: true
    ssl.enabled: true

Step 5 - Validate configuration

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

deb/rpm

sudo filebeat -e -c /etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml

macOS

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

Windows

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

Step 6 - Start filebeat

Ok, time to start ingesting data!

deb/rpm

sudo systemctl enable filebeat
sudo systemctl start filebeat

Windows

Start-Service filebeat

Step 7 - Apache Kafka Logging Overview

Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform written in Scala & Java, that is primarily used for generating low latency real-time data streaming pipelines for apps & data lake engines.

Kafka offers users the ability to publish & subscribe to record streams, decouple data & sort the aggregated data in chronological order for improved real-time processing. The platform is suited to processing many trillions of cross systems events per day making the tool ideal as a big data solution.

Kafka is one of the leading Apache projects and is used by enterprise level businesses globally; including Uber, LinkedIn, Netflix & Twitter. Much of this infrastructure also uses Logstash, which works side by side with the platform as Kafka acts as a buffer between the two for improved resilience.

The combined power of Elasticsearch, Logstash & Kibana form the Elastic Stack which can be used for efficient log analysis as platform & Kafka broker logs contain vital information on the performance & overall health of your systems.

Our hosted Elastic Stack solution can help monitor & visualise Kafka logs and alert you on performance issues & broker degradation in real time. Logit’s built in Kibana can easily generate dashboards for capturing various Kafka log messages along with their severity counts.

If you need any assistance with analysing your Kafka logs (no matter if their server, utils or state-change logs) we're here to help. Feel free to get in touch by contacting the Logit help team via chat & we'll be happy to help you start analysing your log data.

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