Filter and enhance data with processorsedit

You can define processors in your configuration to process events before they are sent to the configured output. The libbeat library provides processors for:

  • reducing the number of exported fields
  • enhancing events with additional metadata
  • performing additional processing and decoding

Each processor receives an event, applies a defined action to the event, and returns the event. If you define a list of processors, they are executed in the order they are defined in the Winlogbeat configuration file.

event -> processor 1 -> event1 -> processor 2 -> event2 ...

It’s recommended to do all drop and renaming of existing fields as the last step in a processor configuration. This is because dropping or renaming fields can remove data necessary for the next processor in the chain, for example dropping the source.ip field would remove one of the fields necessary for the community_id processor to function. If it’s necessary to remove, rename or overwrite an existing event field, please make sure it’s done by a corresponding processor (drop_fields, rename or add_fields) placed at the end of the processor list defined in the input configuration.

For example, the following filter configuration drops a few fields that are rarely used (provider_guid, process_id, thread_id, and version) and one nested field, event_data.ErrorSourceTable:

processors:
  - drop_fields:
      fields: [winlog.provider_guid, winlog.process.pid, winlog.process.thread.id, winlog.version, winlog.event_data.ErrorSourceTable]