Troubleshoot logs

Use this page to find possible solutions for errors your encountering with your logs. This troubleshooting page is broken into the following sections:

This section provides possible solutions for errors you might encounter while onboarding your logs.

When adding a new data using the guided instructions in your project (Add data → Collect and analyze logs → Stream log files), if you don’t have the required privileges to create an API key, you’ll see the following error message:

You need to either:

If your Observability project is not accessible from the host, you’ll see the following error message after pasting the Install the Elastic Agent instructions into the host:

Failed to connect to {host} port {port} after 0 ms: Connection refused

The host needs access to your project. Port 443 must be open and the project’s Elasticsearch endpoint must be reachable. You can locate your project’s endpoint by clicking the help icon () and selecting Endpoints. Run the following command, replacing the URL with your endpoint, and you should get an authentication error with more details on resolving your issue:

curl https://your-endpoint.elastic.cloud

If the host was able to download the installation script but cannot connect to the public artifact repository, you’ll see the following error message:

Download Elastic Agent

Failed to download Elastic Agent, see script for error.

If an Elastic Agent already exists on your host, you’ll see the following error message:

Install Elastic Agent

Failed to install Elastic Agent, see script for error.

You can uninstall the current Elastic Agent using the elastic-agent uninstall command, and run the script again.

If the Waiting for Logs to be shipped…​ step never completes, logs are not being shipped to your Observability project, and there is most likely an issue with your Elastic Agent configuration.

Inspect the Elastic Agent logs for errors. See the Debug standalone Elastic Agents documentation for more on finding errors in Elastic Agent logs.

This section provides possible solutions for mapping and pipeline issues you might encounter with your logs.

The keyword field limit is 32,766 bytes. When indexing a document, if your keyword field length exceeds this limit, you’ll see an error similar to the following:

max_bytes_length_exceeded_exception: bytes can be at most 32766 in length

Avoid this error using one of the following options:

Stop indexing the field: If you don’t need the keyword field for aggregation or search, set "index":false in the index template to stop indexing the field.

Convert the keyword field to a text field: To continue indexing the field while avoiding length limits, you can convert the keyword field to a text field.

To convert the keyword field to a text field:

If the format of the date field in your document doesn’t match the format set in your index template, you’ll see an error similar to the following:

failed to parse field [date] of type [date] in document with id 'KGcZb3cBqhj6kAxank_x'.

Add the format of the mismatched date to your index template. Multiple formats can be specified by separating them with || as a separator. Each format will be tried in turn until a matching format is found. For example:

PUT my-index-000001
{
  "mappings": {
    "properties": {
      "date": {
        "type":   "date",
        "format": "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss||yyyy-MM-dd||epoch_millis"
      }
    }
  }
}

Refer to the date field type docs for more information.

If the pattern in your grok or dissect processor doesn’t match the format of your document, you’ll see an error similar to the following:

Provided Grok patterns do not match field value...

Make sure your grok or dissect processor pattern matches your log document format.

You can build and debug grok patterns in Kibana using the Grok Debugger. Find the Grok Debugger by navigating to the Developer tools page using the navigation menu or the global search field.

From here, you can enter sample data representative of the log document you’re trying to ingest and the Grok pattern you want to apply to the data.

If you don’t see any Structured Data when you simulate the grok pattern, iterate on the pattern until you find the error.