Product release

Beats 1.2.1 released

Today we are pleased to announce the bug fix release of Beats 1.2.1.

    Change the behaviour of environment variables expansion

    Version 1.2.0 introduced the possibility of using environment variables in the configuration file. This is a great feature because it allows you to inject settings via environment variables, but the way it was initially implemented was a bit too simplistic. The way it worked was that before parsing the configuration file, the code simply replaced strings like $NAME or ${NAME} with the value of the NAME environment variable.

    However, we didn't account for the usage of $ as a literal in configurations files. For example, if a dollar sign shows up in a password or in a regular expression, it will get removed together with the word next to it. This can break existing configuration files. In Beats 1.2.1 we restrict to one form and replace only ${NAME} with the value of the NAME environment variable.

    We started our own configuration handling library to improve the environment variables expansion so that it works only on selected options.

    Add username to Topbeat

    We were planning to add support for reporting the user name of a process in Beats 1.2.0, but we discovered in the late stages of QA that it doesn’t actually work, so we removed it from the release notes. It is now fully working in Beats 1.2.1.

    Other fixes coming with Beats 1.2.1

    1. Removed the Redis deprecation warning from code. Note that the Redis output doesn’t currently provide the same guarantees as the Elasticsearch and Logstash outputs, but we no longer plan to remove it. Instead, we will improve it to bring it to the same level of support as the other outputs.
    2. Fixed Topbeat issue with the cpu.system_p value being occasionally greater than 1 on Windows.  The fix was to not do floating point arithmetic.

    Send us feedback!

    A big Thank You to everyone who contributed code, reported issues, created a new Beat or just tried the Beats. Start your experience with Beats 1.2.1 and let us know what you think on discussTwitter, or open an issue on GitHub.