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

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 - 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 Windows, you must also download and install a packet sniffing library, such as Npcap, that implements the libpcap interfaces.

Once installed you can then 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)

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.

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

There's also a full example configuration file called packetbeat.full.yml that shows all the possible options.

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"]

No input available! Your stack is missing the required input for this data source Talk to support to add the input

Step 6 - 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 7 - Start Packetbeat

Ok, time to start ingesting data!

deb/rpm

sudo service packetbeat start

mac

./packetbeat -e

win

Start-Service packetbeat

Step 8 - 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.

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