WebSocket

The websocket output plugin allows to flush your records into a WebSocket endpoint. For now the functionality is pretty basic and it issues a HTTP GET request to do the handshake, and then use TCP connections to send the data records in either JSON or MessagePack (or JSON) format.

Configuration Parameters

Key Description default
Host IP address or hostname of the target WebScoket Server 127.0.0.1
Port TCP port of the target WebScoket Server 80
URI Specify an optional HTTP URI for the target websocket server, e.g: /something /
Format Specify the data format to be used in the HTTP request body, by default it uses msgpack. Other supported formats are json, json_stream and json_lines and gelf. msgpack
json_date_key Specify the name of the date field in output date
json_date_format Specify the format of the date. Supported formats are double and iso8601 (eg: 2018-05-30T09:39:52.000681Z) double
idle_interval The interval that websocket output plugin would keep to decide if it is OK to reconnect to Websocket Server 20

Getting Started

In order to insert records into a HTTP server, you can run the plugin from the command line or through the configuration file:

Command Line

The websocket plugin, can read the parameters from the command line in two ways, through the -p argument (property) or setting them directly through the service URI. The URI format is the following:

  1. http://host:port/something

Using the format specified, you could start Fluent Bit through:

  1. $ fluent-bit -i cpu -t cpu -o websocket://192.168.2.3:80/something -m '*'

Configuration File

In your main configuration file, append the following Input & Output sections:

  1. [INPUT]
  2.     Name  cpu
  3.     Tag   cpu
  5. [OUTPUT]
  6.     Name  websocket
  7.     Match *
  8.     Host  192.168.2.3
  9.     Port  80
  10.     URI   /something
  11.     Format json
  12.     Idle_interval 21

Suggested configuration for Idle Interval is 20. Websocket plugin is working with tcp keepalive mode, please refer to networking section for details.

By default, if there is no traffic for about 30 seconds, fluent-bit would abort the tcp connection. As a result, if websocket would like to send data to the same server again, it has to reconnect. This parameter is to help to determine if websocket need to reconnect or not.

Testing

Configuration File

  1. [INPUT]
  2.     Name        tcp
  3.     Listen      0.0.0.0
  4.     Port        5170
  5.     Format      json
  6. [OUTPUT]
  7.     Name           websocket
  8.     Match          *
  9.     Host           127.0.0.1
  10.     Port           9000
  11.     URI            /
  12.     Format         json
  13.     Idle_interval  21

Once Fluent Bit is running, you can send some messages using the netcat:

  1. $ echo '{"key 1": 123456789, "key 2": "abcdefg"}' | nc 127.0.0.1 5170; sleep 35; echo '{"key 1": 123456789, "key 2": "abcdefg"}' | nc 127.0.0.1 5170

In Fluent Bit we should see the following output:

  1. bin/fluent-bit -c ../conf/out_ws.conf
  2. Fluent Bit v1.5.0
  3. * Copyright (C) 2019-2020 The Fluent Bit Authors
  4. * Copyright (C) 2015-2018 Treasure Data
  5. * Fluent Bit is a CNCF sub-project under the umbrella of Fluentd
  6. * https://fluentbit.io
  8. [2020/07/07 03:39:31] [ info] [storage] version=1.0.4, initializing...
  9. [2020/07/07 03:39:31] [ info] [storage] in-memory
  10. [2020/07/07 03:39:31] [ info] [storage] normal synchronization mode, checksum disabled, max_chunks_up=128
  11. [2020/07/07 03:39:31] [ info] [engine] started (pid=12734)
  12. [2020/07/07 03:39:31] [ info] [input:tcp:tcp.0] listening on 0.0.0.0:5170
  13. [2020/07/07 03:39:31] [ info] [out_ws] we have following parameter /, 127.0.0.1, 9000, 22
  14. [2020/07/07 03:39:31] [ info] [sp] stream processor started
  15. [2020/07/07 03:39:36] [ info] [out_ws] handshake for ws
  16. [2020/07/07 03:40:11] [ warn] [engine] failed to flush chunk '12734-1594107609.72852130.flb', retry in 6 seconds: task_id=0, input=tcp.0 > output=websocket.0
  17. [2020/07/07 03:40:17] [ info] [out_ws] handshake for ws
  18. [2020/07/07 03:40:17] [ info] [engine] flush chunk '12734-1594107609.72852130.flb' succeeded at retry 1: task_id=1, input=tcp.0 > output=websocket.0

Scenario Description

From the output of fluent-bit log, we see that once data has been ingested into fluent bit, plugin would perform handshake. After a while, no data or traffic is undergoing, tcp connection has been abort. And then another piece of data arrived, a try fro websocket plugin has been triggered, following with another handshake and data flush.