Product release

Logstash 6.5.0 Released

Logstash 6.5.0 has been released with many new features and enhancements. This release introduces a SNMP poller input plugin and an output plugin for Elastic App Search (Beta). There are also improvements to the Java Execution which we are promoting from ‘Experimental’ to ‘Beta’. You can find the full list of the changes in the release notes.

Java Execution

In the 6.5.0 release, we are promoting the Java execution engine from experimental status to a beta feature as it progresses towards GA status. We’ve worked with a number of early adopters to validate its behavior and resolve any issues that were encountered along the way.

The Java execution engine improves the event processing pipeline in Logstash in a number of ways:

  • Increases performance. Most workloads run 10-20% faster on the Java execution engine than on the Ruby execution engine.
  • Reduces memory usage. Object allocations in the event processing pipeline have been reduced so that workloads require less memory and spend less CPU time in GC cycles.
  • Starts and reloads pipeline faster. For larger Logstash configurations, we routinely see a 5x improvement in pipeline startup times with up to a 20x improvement in certain cases.
  • Facilitates future optimizations and feature development. We’d like to make even more improvements and optimizations to the event processing pipeline and the Java execution engine will provide us with more opportunities to do that.

Give the Java execution engine a try and see how it performs on your workload. You can enable it with the --java-execution flag on the command line or by adding pipeline.java_execution: true to your logstash.yml file.

SNMP Input (GA)

6.5.0 sees the eagerly anticipated release of the SNMP input plugin used to poll network devices using the Simple Network Management Protocol. We have made numerous improvements over the beta (thank you to all the early adopters!) period and are happy to announce the general availability of this plugin.

The plugin supports SNMP v1, v2c, and v3 over UDP and TCP transport protocols. The plugin includes IETF MIBs and allows other MIBs to be manually imported.

For more details on the plugin and usage instructions, check the documentation page.

Elastic App Search Output (Beta)

We are also pleased to announce the introduction of an output plugin for easier integrations with Elastic App Search. Using this plugin, Elastic App Search users can now use Logstash to add data to their App Search solutions.

This plugin is introduced as a Beta, and we encourage you to try it out and give your feedback!

For more details on the plugin and usage instructions, check the documentation page.

Other Plugin Improvements

Logstash 6.5.0 includes a number of improvements to some of our bundled plugins. Some highlights:

  • The Translate filter has many enhancements including a code re-organization that significantly improves performance and a new iterate_on option that supports fields that are arrays.
  • The TCP input has been re-worked to use Netty in SSL server mode which yields increased performance. Improvements have also been made to its certificate chaining support.

Feedback

If you want to make use of the new features added in Logstash 6.5.0, please download it, install it, and let us know what you think on Twitter (@elastic) or in our forum. Enjoy!