WARNING: Version 5.2 of Filebeat has passed its EOL date.

This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be removed. If you are running this version, we strongly advise you to upgrade. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.

Elastic Docs ›Filebeat Reference [5.2] ›Getting Started With Filebeat
« Step 1: Installing Filebeat Step 3: Configuring Filebeat to Use Logstash »

Step 2: Configuring Filebeatedit

To configure Filebeat, you edit the configuration file. For rpm and deb, you’ll find the configuration file at /etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml. For mac and win, look in the archive that you just extracted. There’s also a full example configuration file called filebeat.full.yml that shows all non-deprecated options.

Here is a sample of the filebeat section of the filebeat.yml file. Filebeat uses predefined default values for most configuration options.

filebeat.prospectors:
- input_type: log
  paths:
    - /var/log/*.log
    #- c:\programdata\elasticsearch\logs\*

To configure Filebeat:

  1. Define the path (or paths) to your log files.

    For the most basic Filebeat configuration, you can define a single prospector with a single path. For example:

    filebeat.prospectors:
- input_type: log
  paths:
    - /var/log/*.log

    The prospector in this example harvests all files in the path /var/log/*.log, which means that Filebeat will harvest all files in the directory /var/log/ that end with .log. All patterns supported by Golang Glob are also supported here.

    To fetch all files from a predefined level of subdirectories, the following pattern can be used: /var/log/*/*.log. This fetches all .log files from the subfolders of /var/log. It does not fetch log files from the /var/log folder itself. Currently it is not possible to recursively fetch all files in all subdirectories of a directory.

  2. If you are sending output to Elasticsearch, set the IP address and port where Filebeat can find the Elasticsearch installation:

    output.elasticsearch:
  hosts: ["192.168.1.42:9200"]

    If you are sending output to Logstash, see Step 3: Configuring Filebeat to Use Logstash instead.

To test your configuration file, change to the directory where the Filebeat binary is installed, and run Filebeat in the foreground with the following options specified: ./filebeat -configtest -e. Make sure your config files are in the path expected by Filebeat (see Directory Layout). If you installed from DEB or RPM packages, run ./filebeat.sh -configtest -e.

See Configuration Options (Reference) for more details about each configuration option.

« Step 1: Installing Filebeat Step 3: Configuring Filebeat to Use Logstash »