Setting up logs monitoring

To set up logs monitoring, you need:

If your data uses nonstandard fields, you may also need to modify some default configuration settings.

To get started, you can use our hosted Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud (recommended for new users), or you can install Elasticsearch and Kibana locally.

The hosted Elasticsearch Service is available on both AWS and GCP. Try out the Elasticsearch Service for free.

Alternatively, you can install Elasticsearch and Kibana locally. Follow the instructions to install Elasticsearch, and to install and start Kibana.

To start collecting logs data, you need to install and configure the Filebeat Beats shipper.

You can install and configure Beats shippers for most kinds of data directly from Kibana, or you can install Beats yourself.

To install Beats from Kibana, on the machine where you want to collect the data, open a Kibana browser window. In the Add Data to Kibana section, click Add log data. Now follow the instructions for the type of data you want to collect. The instructions walk you through the steps required to download, install and configure the appropriate Beats modules for your data.

If your data source doesn’t have a Beats module, or if you want to install Beats the old fashioned way, follow the instructions in Filebeat modules quick start and enable modules for the logs you want to collect. If there is no module for the logs you want to collect, see the Filebeat getting started to learn how to configure inputs.

However you install Beats, you need to enable the appropriate modules in Filebeat to start collecting logs data.

To collect logs from your host system, enable:

To collect logs from Docker containers, enable:

To collect logs from Kubernetes pods, enable:

If your logs data has nonstandard fields, you may need to modify some configuration settings in Kibana, such as the index pattern used to query the data, and the timestamp field used for sorting. You can use the Settings tab in the Logs app to modify some common settings. Alternatively, see logs settings for a complete list of logs configuration settings.

If you’re monitoring Docker containers or Kubernetes pods, you can use autodiscovery to automatically change the configuration settings in response to changes in your containers. This ensures you don’t stop collecting data when your container configuration changes. To learn how to do this, see Filebeat autodiscover configuration.