Brewing in Beats: Filebeat modules polishing

Welcome to Brewing in Beats! With this weekly series, we're keeping you up to date with what's new in Beats, including the latest commits and releases.

Meet the Beats team at Elastic{ON} 2017

The Beats team is gathering in San Francisco to participate to the Elastic{ON} conference (Mar 7 - Mar 9). If you are there as well, just drop by the AMA booth to ask questions, to tell us about how you are using Beats or just to share the feedback with us. There are three talks about Beats:

Hope to see you there!

Filebeat modules: Improve error handling in case of missing plugins

Some of the existing Filebeat modules depend on one or more Elasticsearch Ingest node plugins (ingest-geoip and/or ingest-user-agent). We’ve now improved the error messages Filebeat displays in case one of the required plugins are not available.

The way it works is that the modules declare which plugins are required in their manifest.yml file and Filebeat queries the /_nodes/ingest API to check that they are available.

Changes in 5.3:

Filebeat

  • Fix empty registry file on machine crash #3684
  • Removed the no_plugins option from nginx and apache2 #3719
  • Fix close_timeout for new started harvesters #3718

All Beats

  • Exempt root owned config files from ownership checker #3696

Metricbeat

  • Handle missing cgroups in Metricbeat #3697
  • Add labels to Docker healthcheck output #3713

Documentation

  • Document process.env.whitelist config option #3722

Winlogbeat

  • Fix handling of empty strings in UTF16BytesToString #3714

Changes in 5.4:

Dashboards

  • Added a dashboard for the Metricbeat MySQL module #3720

Changes in master:

xbeats

  • Implement new data structure for Kibana xbeats #31

Dashboards

  • Change Counter label to Container #3651
  • Clean up import_dashboards #3712

All Beats

  • Increase template order of new templates to 1 #3670
  • Simplify template generation and handling #3683
  • Fix early logging race when pprof is used #3685
  • Fix composite literal uses unkeyed fields error in check #3701
  • Extract version to separate package to prevent cyclic imports #3708
  • Remove templates as they are auto generated #3709

Documentation

  • Add module info to getting started #3672 #3673
  • Fix expvar metricset doc #3700