A list of glob-based paths that should be crawled and fetched. Filebeat starts a harvester for each file that it finds under the specified paths. You can specify one path per line. Each line begins with a dash (-).

One of the following input types:

The value that you specify here is used as the input_type for each event published to Logstash and Elasticsearch.

Optional fields that you can specify to add additional information to the output. For example, you might add fields that you can use for filtering log data. By default, the fields that you specify here will be grouped under a fields sub-dictionary in the output document. To store the custom fields as top-level fields, set the fields_under_root option to true.

fields:
    level: debug
    review: 1

If this option is set to true, the custom fields are stored as top-level fields in the output document instead of being grouped under a fields sub-dictionary. If the custom field names conflict with other field names added by Filebeat, the custom fields overwrite the other fields.

If this option is specified, Filebeat ignores any files that were modified before the specified timespan. You can use time strings like 2h (2 hours) and 5m (5 minutes). The default is 24h.

How often the prospector checks for new files in the paths that are specified for harvesting. For example, if you specify a glob like /var/log/*, the directory is scanned for files using the frequency specified by scan_frequency. Specify 1s to scan the directory as frequently as possible without causing Filebeat to scan too frequently. The default setting is 10s.

The event type to use for published lines read by harvesters. For Elasticsearch output, the value that you specify here is used to set the type field in the output document. The default value is log.

The buffer size every harvester uses when fetching the file. The default is 16384.

If this option is set to true, Filebeat starts reading new files at the end of each file instead of the beginning. When this option is used in combination with log rotation, it’s possible that the first log entries in a new file might be skipped. The default setting is false.

The backoff options specify how aggressively Filebeat crawls new files for updates. You can use the default values in most cases.

The backoff option defines how long Filebeat waits before checking a file again after EOF is reached. The default is 1s, which means the file is checked every second if new lines were added. This enables near real-time crawling. Every time a new line appears in the file, the backoff value is reset to the initial value. The default is 1s.

The maximum time for Filebeat to wait before checking a file again after EOF is reached. After having backed off multiple times from checking the file, the wait time will never exceed max_backoff regardless of what is specified for backoff_factor. Because it takes a maximum of 10s to read a new line, specifying 10s for max_backoff means that, at the worst, a new line could be added to the log file if Filebeat has backed off multiple times. The default is 10s.

This option specifies how fast the waiting time is increased. The bigger the backoff factor, the faster the max_backoff value is reached. The backoff factor increments exponentially. The minimum value allowed is 1. If this value is set to 1, the backoff algorithm is disabled, and the backoff value is used for waiting for new lines. The backoff value will be multiplied each time with the backoff_factor until max_backoff is reached. The default is 2.

Sometimes Filebeat checks a line before it’s completely written. This option specifies how long the harvester waits for the system to complete a line before skipping that line. The default is 5s.

By default, Filebeat keeps the files that it’s reading open until the timespan specified by ignore_older has elapsed. This behaviour can cause issues when a file is removed. On Windows, the file cannot be fully removed until Filebeat closes the file. In addition no new file with the same name can be created during this time.

You can force Filebeat to close the file as soon as the file name changes by setting the force_close_files option to true. The default is false. Turning on this option can lead to loss of data on rotated files in case not all lines were read from the rotated file.

The event count spool threshold. This setting forces a network flush if the specified value is exceeded.

filebeat:
  spool_size: 1024

A duration string that specifies how often the spooler is flushed. After the idle_timeout is reached, the spooler is flushed even if the spool_size has not been reached.

filebeat:
  idle_timeout: 5s

The name of the registry file. By default, the registry file is put in the current working directory. If the working directory changes for subsequent runs of Filebeat, indexing starts from the beginning again.

filebeat:
  registry_file: .filebeat

The full Path to the directory that contains additional prospector configuration files. Each configuration file must end with .yml. Each config file must also specify the full Filebeat config hierarchy even though only the prospector part of the file is processed. All global options, such as spool_size, are ignored.

The config_dir option MUST point to a directory other than the directory where the main Filebeat config file resides.

filebeat:
  config_dir: path/to/configs

The file encoding to use for reading files that contain international characters. See the encoding names recommended by the W3C for use in HTML5.

Here are some sample encodings from W3C recommendation:

The plain encoding is special, because it does not validate or transform any input.