This functionality is experimental and may be changed or removed completely in a future release. Elastic will take a best effort approach to fix any issues, but experimental features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

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Journalbeat and systemd

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Journalbeat and systemd

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The DEB and RPM packages include a service unit for Linux systems with systemd. On these systems, you can manage Journalbeat by using the usual systemd commands.

Start and stop Journalbeat

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Use systemctl to start or stop Journalbeat:

systemctl start journalbeat

systemctl stop journalbeat

By default, the Journalbeat service starts automatically when the system boots. To enable or disable auto start use:

systemctl enable journalbeat

systemctl disable journalbeat

Journalbeat status and logs

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To get the service status, use systemctl:

systemctl status journalbeat

Logs are stored by default in journald. To view the Logs, use journalctl:

journalctl -u journalbeat.service

The unit file included in the packages sets the -e flag by default. This flag makes Journalbeat log to stderr and disables other log outputs. Systemd stores all output sent to stderr in journald.

Customize systemd unit for Journalbeat

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The systemd service unit file includes environment variables that you can override to change the default options.

Variable	Description	Default value
BEAT_LOG_OPTS	Log options	`-e`
BEAT_CONFIG_OPTS	Flags for configuration file path	`-c /etc/journalbeat/journalbeat.yml`
BEAT_PATH_OPTS	Other paths	`-path.home /usr/share/journalbeat -path.config /etc/journalbeat -path.data /var/lib/journalbeat -path.logs /var/log/journalbeat`

To override these variables, create a drop-in unit file in the /etc/systemd/system/journalbeat.service.d directory.

For example a file with the following content placed in /etc/systemd/system/journalbeat.service.d/debug.conf would override BEAT_LOG_OPTS to enable debug for Elasticsearch output.

[Service]
Environment="BEAT_LOG_OPTS=-e -d elasticsearch"

To change the logging output from the Journalbeat configuration file, empty the environment variable. For example:

[Service]
Environment="BEAT_LOG_OPTS="

To apply your changes, reload the systemd configuration and restart the service:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart journalbeat

It is recommended that you use a configuration management tool to include drop-in unit files. If you need to add a drop-in manually, use systemctl edit journalbeat.service.

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