Filebeats vs logstash
In your use case, it would likely be better to just create a new input if you are not going to use the log input, as syslog, set the port, protocol, and host listener (As per the examples here: ), and then set an output to either Logstash or Elasticsearch (or any of the outputs here: )
There's inputs, some stuff happens in the middle, and there's at least one output. To an extent (and a gross simplification), they follow some similar patterns. However, one of the biggest differences is that beats have one output, max (At least last I checked), and Logstash can have as many as resources allow. One major difference is that you can have lots and lots of beats, but you tend to have only a few Logstash systems.īeats are more of a client, though they CAN act more in that server role, and syslog is one of those times. It's a workhorse.īeats, on the other hand, were small, purpose driven tools, written in golang, so they are, on the whole, smaller, faster, and lighter weight, and act as collectors and senders of data. It's written in Java, but makes a lot of use of jruby, so it has the power to do a lot. Logstash is a big, powerful, ETL and can work as a sort of hub for different data sets to come in, and go out, to multiple places. I work for Elastic - The company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack (which includes beats and Logstash, among other things) Eventually, I'll build an environment just for their logs and then let them find my actions as a final, but right now that seems like a pipedream). I want to add all the logs from all my VMs and other servers/containers/networking equipment/etc in the network to ELK (I teach forensics to college students and they use my environment to complete homework and finals so I want to maintain logs of there actions. Some background information that might be helpful. This is where I constantly get stuck on ELK. Would I change the -type: log to -type: syslog or add a new type underneath? # Paths that should be crawled and fetched. # Change to true to enable this input configuration. # Below are the input specific configurations. # you can use different inputs for various configurations. Most options can be set at the input level, so
Would I need to different servers to serve as filebeats? Or will it create a new index for each item being passed to it?
I think I really just don't understand how I would add say Ubiquiti syslog and Unraid syslog to the same location and it would be able to filter those out without assuming the came from the same device. My issue is, I do not understand the difference between logstash and the *beat items. I am attempting to setup a syslog/log retention location for my homelab. You can increase verbosity by setting logging.level: debug in your config file.First off, thank you for whatever help/recommendations you can provide. The logs are located at /var/log/filebeat/filebeat by default on Linux. usr/share/filebeat/scripts/import_dashboards -es You can check if data is contained in a filebeat-YYYY.MM.dd index in Elasticsearch using a curl command that will print the event count.Ĭurl And you can check the Filebeat logs for errors if you have no events in Elasticsearch.
This is for Linux when installed via RPM or deb. The path to the import_dashboards script may vary based on how you installed Filebeat.
#Filebeats vs logstash install#
Alternatively you could run the import_dashboards script provided with Filebeat and it will install an index pattern into Kibana for you. So in Kibana you should configure a time based index pattern based on the filebeat-* index pattern instead of logstash-*. It uses the filebeat-* index instead of the logstash-* index so that it can use its own index template and have exclusive control over the data in that index. If you followed the official Filebeat getting started guide and are routing data from Filebeat -> Logstash -> Elasticearch, then the data produced by Filebeat is supposed to be contained in a filebeat-YYYY.MM.dd index.