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Packetbeat Configuration Example
Ship Network Data with Packetbeat
Packetbeat is a network package analyser used to capture network traffic. It can be used to extract useful fields of information from network transactions before shipping them to one or more destinations, including Logstash. This is useful for troubleshooting and detecting performance hits.
Step 1 - Install
deb (Debian/Ubuntu/Mint)
curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/packetbeat/packetbeat-oss-7.8.1-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i packetbeat-oss-7.8.1-amd64.deb
rpm (CentOS/RHEL/Fedora)
curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/packetbeat/packetbeat-oss-7.8.1-x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -vi packetbeat-oss-7.8.1-x86_64.rpm
macOS
curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/packetbeat/packetbeat-oss-7.8.1-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzvf packetbeat-oss-7.8.1-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz
Windows
- Download the packetbeat Windows zip file from the official downloads page.
- Extract the contents of the zip file into C:\Program Files.
- Rename the
packetbeat-<version>-windows
directory topacketbeat
. - 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 packetbeat as a Windows service:
cd 'C:\Program Files\packetbeat'
.\install-service-packetbeat.ps1
PowerShell.exe -ExecutionPolicy UnRestricted -File .\install-service-packetbeat.ps1
.
Step 2 - Locate the configuration file
deb/rpm /etc/packetbeat/packetbeat.yml
mac/win <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>/packetbeat.yml
Step 3 - Configure Packetbeat
Packetbeat needs to be configured to select the network interface from which to capture the traffic.
On Linux: Packetbeat supports capturing all messages sent or received by the server on which Packetbeat is installed. For this, use any as the device:
packetbeat.interfaces.device: any
On OS X, capturing from the any device does not work. You would typically use either lo0 or en0 depending on which traffic you want to capture.
On Windows, run the following command to list the available network interfaces:
PS C:\Program Files\Packetbeat> .\packetbeat.exe -devices
0: \Device\NPF_{113535AD-934A-452E-8D5F-3004797DE286} (Intel(R) PRO/1000 MT Desktop Adapter)
In this example, there is only one network card, with the index 0, installed on the system. If there are multiple network cards, remember the index of the device you want to use for capturing the traffic.
Modify the device line to point to the index of the device:
packetbeat.interfaces.device: 0
Step 4 - Configure protocols
In the protocols section, configure the ports on which Packetbeat can find each protocol. If you use any non-standard ports, add them here. Otherwise, the default values should do just fine.
packetbeat.protocols.dns:
ports: [53]
include_authorities: true
include_additionals: true
packetbeat.protocols.http:
ports: [80, 8080, 8081, 5000, 8002]
packetbeat.protocols.memcache:
ports: [11211]
packetbeat.protocols.mysql:
ports: [3306]
packetbeat.protocols.pgsql:
ports: [5432]
packetbeat.protocols.redis:
ports: [6379]
packetbeat.protocols.thrift:
ports: [9090]
packetbeat.protocols.mongodb:
ports: [27017]
packetbeat.protocols.cassandra:
ports: [9042]
Step 5 - 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 6 - Validate configuration
Let's check the configuration file is syntactically correct by running packetbeat directly inside the terminal.
If the file is invalid, packetbeat will print an error loading config file
error message with details on how to correct the problem.
deb/rpm
sudo packetbeat -e -c /etc/packetbeat/packetbeat.yml
macOS
cd <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>
./packetbeat -e -c packetbeat.yml
Windows
cd <EXTRACTED_ARCHIVE>
.\packetbeat.exe -e -c packetbeat.yml