Logstash

Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. When used generically the term encompases a larger system of log collection, processing, storage and searching activities.

Overview

Logstash is used to gather logging messages, convert them into json documents and store them in an Elasticsearch cluster. Kibana is used as a frontend client to search for and display messages from Elasticsearch cluster.

Logstash

Logstash is a tool that can be used to collect, process and forward events and log messages. Collection is accomplished via number of configurable input plugins including raw socket/packet communication, file tailing and several message bus clients. Once an input plugin has collected data it can be processed by any number of filters which modify and annotate the event data. Finally events are routed to output plugins which can forward the events to a variety of external programs including Elasticsearch, local files and several message bus implementations.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a multi-node Lucene implementation. The same technology powers the CirrusSearch on WMF wikis.

Kibana

Kibana is a browser based analytics and search interface for Elasticsearch that was developed primarily to view Logstash event data.

Production Logstash

Web interface

logstash.wikimedia.org

Authentication

wikitech LDAP username and password and membership in the "wmf" LDAP group.

Hosts

logstash100[1-3] servers in Eqiad.

Configuration

Each host provides a Logstash instance, an Elasticsearch node, a Redis server and an Apache vhost serving the Kibana application. The Apache vhosts also act as reverse proxies to the Elasticsearch cluster and perform LDAP-based authentication to restrict access to the potentially sensitive log information. The misc Varnish cluster is being used to provide ssl termination and load balancing support.

Prototype (Beta) Logstash

Web interface

logstash-beta.wmflabs.org

Authentication

Limited access; The username and password can be found on deployment-bastion.eqiad.wmflabs in the /root/secrets.txt file.

Hosts

deployment-logstash1.eqiad.wmflabs

Configuration

It hosts a functional Logstash + Elasticsearch + Kibana stack at logstash-beta.wmflabs.org that aggregates log data produced by the beta cluster.

Documents

• Common Logging Schema
• Extended Retention
• Interface
• SRE onboard
• Tasks

Gotchas

GELF transport

Make sure logging events sent to the GELF input don't have a "type" or "_type" field set, or if set, that it contains the value "gelf". The gelf/logstash config discards any events that have a different value set for "type" or "_type".