Breaking Changes in 5.0edit

This section discusses the changes that you should be aware of if you upgrade the Beats from version 1.x to 5.x.

URL changes for DEB/RPM packagesedit

The previous packages.elastic.co URL has been altered to artifacts.elastic.co. Ensure you update your repository files before running the upgrade process, or your operating system may not see the new packages.

Configuration File Changesedit

Beats 5.0 comes with a more powerful and more robust file configuration format. While this necessarily causes a few breaking changes, we provide a migration script that should make upgrading easy. Please see the Upgrading section.

For consistency and clarity, all configuration options that are specific to a particular Beat are now prefixed by the name of the Beat. For example, the interfaces.device option from Packetbeat becomes packetbeat.interfaces.device. This change is made automatically by the migration script.

Similarly, common settings available in all Beats are now top level. As part of this effort, the options under the shipper section are moved to the top level. For example, the shipper.name settings becomes name. This change is made automatically by the migration script.

For consistency with the rest of the Elastic stack, several TLS/SSL related options where changed:

  • the name of the section was renamed from tls to ssl
  • certificate_key was renamed to key
  • insecure was replaced by verification_mode
  • min_version and max_version were replaced with supported_protocols

These changes are made automatically by the migration script.

In Filebeat, we refactored the configuration around when to close and when to start ignoring files. Options like close_older and force_close_older were changed or replaced with options from the close_* group. See the How Filebeat Works docs for details. These changes are not made automatically by the migration script.

Field Renamesedit

Beats 5.0 also comes with several changes in the exported fields. If you are using these fields in Kibana dashboards, you will likely need to adjust the dashbaords.

Changes:

Location Old name New Name

Packetbeat HTTP module

http.phrase

http.response.phrase

Packetbeat HTTP module

http.code

http.response.code

Packetbeat HTTP module

http.response_headers

http.response.headers

Packetbeat HTTP module

http.request_headers

http.request.headers

Packetbeat HTTP module

http.params

http.request.params

Packetbeat HTTP module

http.content_length

http.response.headers.content-length

Packetbeat HTTP module

http.content_length

http.response.headers.content-length

Packetbeat DNS module

dns.flags.recursion_allowed

dns.flags.recursion_available

Packetbeat DNS module

dns.flags.recursion_allowed

dns.flags.recursion_available

In addition, the unused count field was removed from all Packetbeat modules.

Installation Pathsedit

For 5.0 we have refactored the directory layout of the Beats, so they are more consistent and in-line with the best practices of each operating system.

A notable change is that on the DEB/RPM installations, the binary is no longer installed in /usr/bin but in /usr/share/<beatname>/bin. Instead, a simple shell script is placed under /usr/bin that is helpful for executing the Beat in foreground. It also sets the path settings to the same values as the init script would use.

For example, here are the contents of the /usr/bin/filebeat.sh script:

> cat /usr/bin/filebeat.sh
#!/bin/bash

# Script to run filebeat in foreground with the same path settings that
# the init script / systemd unit file would do.

/usr/share/filebeat/bin/filebeat \
  -path.home /usr/share/filebeat \
  -path.config /etc/filebeat \
  -path.data /var/lib/filebeat \
  -path.logs /var/log/filebeat \
  $@