I'm working on node application and my main goal is to maintain the logs (error, info) of the backend part in logstash so that I could do some analysis of which API is breaking and why. I'm new to logstash and I read some basics of the logstash and elastic stacks. I want to achieve the following -
Integrate logstash to maintain the logs.
Read the logs to analysis the breaking changes.
I don't want to integrate the elastic search and kibana. I tried winston-logstash but it's not working and this library source code is not maintainable either. If anyone knows how to implement the above thing in nodejs application, Please let me know.
If your nodejs app runs as a docker container, you can use the gelf logging driver and then just log to console/stdout in nodejs and it will get routed to logstash.
Keep in mind Logstash is really just for transformation/enrichment/filtering/etc. you still probably want to output the log events (from Logstash) to an underlying logging solution e.g. elasticsearch.
Related
I'd like to get the following system: once an event occurs in Cloud Foundry, it is loaded to elasticsearch. Using logstash would be fine, but I explored its input plugin and couldn't find anything that I could use. What is the best solution for this scenario? At the moment I can think of writing a script that would continuously pull the data using CF api and load it to elasticsearch. Is there a better way of doing it?
I can think of two solutions:
Create a "drain" (e.g., via the drain CLI) for the app you
would like to see events for and drain it to your ELK deployment.
This should forward each event (formatted as rfc 5425 syslog) to
elastic search.
If you are using the Loggregator Firehose to write data into elastic
search (e.g., via firehose-to-syslog) then you will get events
(as log messages). This has the downside of everything ends up in
your ELK deployment.
In our application we want to read logs from 2 different servers i.e apache tomcat and Jboss and want to monitor the logs. I have tried to search online to how to configure it but not albe to understand clearly about how can i implement it in graylog. Please help. Thank you.
You can send logs from an arbitrary number of applications and systems to Graylog (even on the same input).
Simply configure your applications and systems to send logs to Graylog and create an appropriate input for them.
See http://docs.graylog.org/en/2.1/pages/sending_data.html for some hints.
Hope you were able to send your logs to graylog server. Centralized logging using graylog will help newbies to get started with graylog and the article explains use cases like integrating apache, nginx, mysql slow query logs to graylog. This covers various ways like sending logs via syslog, graylog apache module, filebeat etc. which most articles miss out explaining in detail.
I've been asked to configure an ELK stack, in order to manage log from several applications of a certain client. I have the given stack hosted and working at a redhat 7 server (followed this cookbook), and a test instance in a virtual machine with Ubuntu 16.04 (followed this other cookbook), but I've hit a roadblock and cannot seem to get through it. Kibana is rather new for me and maybe I don't fully understand the way it works. In addition, the most important application of the client is a JHipster managed application, another tool I am not familiarized.
Up until now, all I've found about jhipster and logstash tells me to install the full ELK stack using Docker (which I haven't, and would rather avoid in orther to keep the configuration I've already made), so that Kibana deployed through that method already has configured a dashboard tunned for displaying the information that the application will send with the native configuration, activated in the application.yml logstash: enabled: true.
So... my questions would be... Can I get that preconfigured jhipster dashboard imported in my preexistent Kibana deploy. Where is the data, logged by the application, stored? can I expect a given humanly readable format? Is there any other way of testing the configuration is working, since I don't have any traffic going through the test instance into the VM?
Since that JHipster app is not the only one I care for, I want other dashboards and inputs to be displayed from other applications, most probably using file beat.
Any reference to useful information is appreciated.
Yes you can. Take a look at this repository: https://github.com/jhipster/jhipster-console/tree/master/jhipster-console
there are the exports (in JSON format) from kibana stored in the repository, along with the load.sh
The scripts adds the configuration by adding them via the API. As you can imply, any recent dashboard is not affected by this, so you can use your existing configuration.
I am working on a solution for centralized log file aggregation from our CentOs 6.x servers. After installing Elasticsearch/Logstash/Kibana (ELK) stack I came across an Rsyslog omelasticsearch plugin which can send messages from Rsyslog to Elasticsearch in logstash format and started asking myself why I need Logstash.
Logstash has a lot of different input plugins including the one accepting Rsyslog messages. Is there a reason why I would use Logstash for my use case where I need to gather the content of logs files from multiple servers? Also, is there a benefit of sending messages from Rsyslog to Logstash instead of sending them directly to Elasticsearch?
I would use Logstash in the middle if there's something I need from it that rsyslog doesn't have. For example, getting GeoIP from an IP address.
If, on the other hand, I would need to get syslog or file contents indexed in Elasticsearch, I'd use rsyslog directly. It can do buffering (disk+memory), filtering, you can choose how the document will look like (you can put the textual severity instead of the number, for example), and it can parse unstructured data. But the main advantage is performance, on which rsyslog is focused on. Here's a presentation with some numbers (and tips and tricks) on Logstash, rsyslog and Elasticsearch:
http://blog.sematext.com/2015/05/18/tuning-elasticsearch-indexing-pipeline-for-logs/
I would recommend logstash. That would be easier to setup, more examples and they are tested to fit together.
Also, there are some benefits, in logstash you can filter and modify your logs.
You can extend logs with useful data: server name, timestamp, ...
Cast types, string to int, etc. (useful for correct Elastic index)
Filter out logs by some rules
Moreover, you can setup batch size to optimize saving to elastic.
Another feature, if something went wrong and there are crazy amount of logs per second that elastic can not process, you can setup logstash that it would save some queue of events or drop events that can not be saved.
If you go straight from the server to elasticsearch, you can get the basic documents in (assuming the source is json, etc). For me, the power of logstash is to add value to the logs by applying business logic to modify and extend the logs.
Here's one example: syslog provides a priority level (0-7). I don't want to have a pie chart where the values are 0-7, so I make a new field that contains the pretty names ("emerg", "debug", etc) that can be used for display.
Just one example...
Neither are a viable option if you really want to rely on the system to operate under load and be highly available.
We found that using rsyslog to send to a centralized location, archive it using redis of kafka and then using logstash to do its magic and ship to Elasticsearch is the best option.
Read our blog about it here - http://logz.io/blog/deploy-elk-production/
(Disclaimer - I am the VP product for logz.io and we offer ELK as a service)
I'm hoping to find a way to use logstash/ES/Kibana to centralize our Windows Server 2012 / IIS8 logs.
It would be great to not have to install Java on our production servers to get logstash to serve just as the shipper. I'm wondering how other windows/IIS sysadmins using logstash have addressed this issue?
E.G., are there other, lighterweight, clients that logstash can consume?
If not, I'll probably just write one in Python that reads and posts to the logstash indexer.
As you say, you need to write program to send the logs to the logstash indexer.
For example,
Logstash indexer use TCP plugin listen at a port. You program will send the logs to the logstash indexer port. In this way you no need to install java program.
As Bel mentioned you can use TCP or UDP input plugins for your architectural need and also you can configure redis, rabbitMQ or ZeroMQ (well supported plugins) and send all your logs to a queue server from where your logstash indexer will pickup all the logs and processes it. Let me know if your facing any difficulty setting up any of the above mentioned steps. I can give you an example.