description: Send logs to Elasticsearch (including Amazon Elasticsearch Service)

Elasticsearch

The es output plugin, allows to ingest your records into an Elasticsearch database. The following instructions assumes that you have a fully operational Elasticsearch service running in your environment.

Configuration Parameters

The parameters index and type can be confusing if you are new to Elastic, if you have used a common relational database before, they can be compared to the database and table concepts. Also see the FAQ below

TLS / SSL

Elasticsearch output plugin supports TTL/SSL, for more details about the properties available and general configuration, please refer to the TLS/SSL section.

Getting Started

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

Command Line

The es 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:

es://host:port/index/type

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

$ fluent-bit -i cpu -t cpu -o es://192.168.2.3:9200/my_index/my_type \
    -o stdout -m '*'

which is similar to do:

$ fluent-bit -i cpu -t cpu -o es -p Host=192.168.2.3 -p Port=9200 \
    -p Index=my_index -p Type=my_type -o stdout -m '*'

Configuration File

In your main configuration file append the following Input & Output sections. You can visualize this configuration here

[INPUT]
    Name  cpu
    Tag   cpu
[OUTPUT]
    Name  es
    Match *
    Host  192.168.2.3
    Port  9200
    Index my_index
    Type  my_type

About Elasticsearch field names

Some input plugins may generate messages where the field names contains dots, since Elasticsearch 2.0 this is not longer allowed, so the current es plugin replaces them with an underscore, e.g:

{"cpu0.p_cpu"=>17.000000}

becomes

{"cpu0_p_cpu"=>17.000000}

FAQ

Elasticsearch rejects requests saying “the final mapping would have more than 1 type”

Since Elasticsearch 6.0, you cannot create multiple types in a single index. This means that you cannot set up your configuration as below anymore.

[OUTPUT]
    Name  es
    Match foo.*
    Index search
    Type  type1
[OUTPUT]
    Name  es
    Match bar.*
    Index search
    Type  type2

If you see an error message like below, you’ll need to fix your configuration to use a single type on each index.

Rejecting mapping update to [search] as the final mapping would have more than 1 type

For details, please read the official blog post on that issue.

Elasticsearch rejects requests saying “Document mapping type name can’t start with ‘_‘“

Fluent Bit v1.5 changed the default mapping type from flb_type to _doc, which matches the recommendation from Elasticsearch from version 6.2 forwards (see commit with rationale). This doesn’t work in Elasticsearch versions 5.6 through 6.1 (see Elasticsearch discussion and fix). Ensure you set an explicit map (such as doc or flb_type) in the configuration, as seen on the last line:

[OUTPUT]
    Name  es
    Match *
    Host  vpc-test-domain-ke7thhzoo7jawsrhmm6mb7ite7y.us-west-2.es.amazonaws.com
    Port  443
    Index my_index
    AWS_Auth On
    AWS_Region us-west-2
    tls   On
    Type  doc

Fluent Bit + Amazon Elasticsearch Service

The Amazon ElasticSearch Service adds an extra security layer where HTTP requests must be signed with AWS Sigv4. Fluent Bit v1.5 introduced full support for Amazon ElasticSearch Service with IAM Authentication.

See here for details on how AWS credentials are fetched.

Example configuration:

[OUTPUT]
    Name  es
    Match *
    Host  vpc-test-domain-ke7thhzoo7jawsrhmm6mb7ite7y.us-west-2.es.amazonaws.com
    Port  443
    Index my_index
    Type  my_type
    AWS_Auth On
    AWS_Region us-west-2
    tls     On

Notice that the Port is set to 443, tls is enabled, and AWS_Region is set.

Fluent Bit + Elastic Cloud

Fluent Bit supports connecting to Elastic Cloud providing just the cloud_id and the cloud_auth settings.

Example configuration:

[OUTPUT]
    Name es
    Include_Tag_Key true
    Tag_Key tags
    tls On
    tls.verify Off
    cloud_id elastic-obs-deployment:ZXVybxxxxxxxxxxxg==
    cloud_auth elastic:2vxxxxxxxxYV