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Configuring Filebeat
editConfiguring Filebeat
editTo configure Filebeat, you edit the filebeat.yml file. Here is a sample of
filebeat
section of the filebeat.yml file:
filebeat: # List of prospectors to fetch data. prospectors: # Each - is a prospector. Below are the prospector specific configurations - # Paths that should be crawled and fetched. Glob based paths. # For each file found under this path, a harvester is started. paths: - "/var/log/*.log" # - c:\programdata\elasticsearch\logs\* # Type of the files. Based on this the way the file is read is decided. # The different types cannot be mixed in one prospector # # Possible options are: # * log: Reads every line of the log file (default) # * stdin: Reads the standard in input_type: log
Filebeat uses predefined default values for most configuration options. For the most basic Filebeat configuration, you can define a single prospector with a single path. For example:
filebeat: prospectors: - paths: - "/var/log/*.log"
The prospector in this example harvests all files in the path /var/log/*.log
, which means
that Filebeat will harvest all files in the directory /var/log/
that end with .log
. All patterns supported
by Golang Glob are also supported here.
To fetch all files from a predefined level of subdirectories, the following pattern can be used:
/var/log/*/*.log
. This fetches all .log
files from the subfolders of /var/log
. It does not
fetch log files from the /var/log
folder itself. Currently it is not possible to recursively
fetch all files in all subdirectories of a directory.
A config file can contain multiple prospectors and multiple paths per prospector as shown in the following example.
Make sure a file is not defined more than once across all prospectors because this can lead to unexpected behaviour.
filebeat: prospectors: - paths: - /var/log/system.log - /var/log/wifi.log - paths: - "/var/log/apache/*"
The config file in the example starts two prospectors. The first prospector has two harvesters,
one harvesting the system.log
file, and the other harvesting wifi.log
. The second prospector
starts a harvester for each file in the apache directory.
See Configuration Options for more details about each configuration option.