enabled

(boolean) Enables or disables the output. If set to false, the output is disabled.

hosts

The addresses your Elastic Agents will use to connect to one or more Kafka brokers.

Following is an example hosts setting with three hosts defined:

    hosts:
      - 'localhost:9092'
      - 'mykafkahost01:9092'
      - 'mykafkahost02:9092'

version

Kafka protocol version that Elastic Agent will request when connecting. Defaults to 1.0.0.

The protocol version controls the Kafka client features available to Elastic Agent; it does not prevent Elastic Agent from connecting to Kafka versions newer than the protocol version.

username

The username for connecting to Kafka. If username is configured, the password must be configured as well.

password

The password for connecting to Kafka.

sasl.mechanism

The SASL mechanism to use when connecting to Kafka. It can be one of:

ssl

When sending data to a secured cluster through the kafka output, Elastic Agent can use SSL/TLS. For a list of available settings, refer to SSL/TLS, specifically the settings under Table 4, “Common configuration options” and Table 5, “Client configuration options”.

queue.mem.events

The number of events the queue can store. This value should be evenly divisible by the smaller of queue.mem.flush.min_events or bulk_max_size to avoid sending partial batches to the output.

Default: 3200 events

queue.mem.flush.min_events

flush.min_events is a legacy parameter, and new configurations should prefer to control batch size with bulk_max_size. As of 8.13, there is never a performance advantage to limiting batch size with flush.min_events instead of bulk_max_size

Default: 1600 events

queue.mem.flush.timeout

(int) The maximum wait time for queue.mem.flush.min_events to be fulfilled. If set to 0s, events are available to the output immediately.

Default: 10s

topic

The default Kafka topic used for produced events.

You can set the topic dynamically by using a format string to access any event field. For example, this configuration uses a custom field, fields.log_topic, to set the topic for each event:

topic: '%{[fields.log_topic]}'

topics

One or more topic processors including a condition, the event value to check against, and the resulting Kafka topic.

Events that don’t match against any defined processor are set to the default topic.

Rule settings:

As an example for setting up your processors, you might want to route log events based on severity. To do so, you can specify a default topic for all events not matched by other processors:

outputs:
  kafka-output:
    type: kafka
    hosts:
      - 'kafka1:9092'
      - 'kafka2:9092'
      - 'kafka3:9092'
    topics:
      - topic: 'critical-%{[agent.version]}'
        when:
          contains:
            message: ' “CRITICAL”'
      - topic: 'error-%{[agent.version]}'
        when:
          contains:
            message: ' “ERR”'
      - topic: '%{[fields.log_topic]}'

All non-critical and non-error events will then route to the default %{[fields.log_topic]} topic.

random.group_events

Sets the number of events to be published to the same partition, before the partitioner selects a new partition by random. The default value is 1 meaning after each event a new partition is picked randomly.

round_robin.group_events

Sets the number of events to be published to the same partition, before the partitioner selects the next partition. The default value is 1 meaning after each event the next partition will be selected.

hash.hash

List of fields used to compute the partitioning hash value from. If no field is configured, the events key value will be used.

hash.random

Randomly distribute events if no hash or key value can be computed.

key

The key to set in the Kafka header.

value

The value to set in the Kafka header.

client_id

The configurable ClientID used for logging, debugging, and auditing purposes. The default is Elastic. The Client ID is part of the protocol to identify where the messages are coming from.

backoff.init

(string) The number of seconds to wait before trying to reconnect to Kafka after a network error. After waiting backoff.init seconds, Elastic Agent tries to reconnect. If the attempt fails, the backoff timer is increased exponentially up to backoff.max. After a successful connection, the backoff timer is reset.

Default: 1s

backoff.max

(string) The maximum number of seconds to wait before attempting to connect to Kafka after a network error.

Default: 60s

broker_timeout

The maximum length of time a Kafka broker waits for the required number of ACKs before timing out (see the required_acks setting further in).

Default: 30 (seconds)

bulk_flush_frequency

(int) Duration to wait before sending bulk Kafka request. 0` is no delay.

Default: 0

bulk_max_size

(int) The maximum number of events to bulk in a single Kafka request.

Default: 2048

channel_buffer_size

(int) Per Kafka broker number of messages buffered in output pipeline.

Default: 256

codec

Output codec configuration. You can specify either the json or format codec. By default the json codec is used.

json.pretty: If pretty is set to true, events will be nicely formatted. The default is false.

json.escape_html: If escape_html is set to true, html symbols will be escaped in strings. The default is false.

Example configuration that uses the json codec with pretty printing enabled to write events to the console:

output.console:
  codec.json:
    pretty: true
    escape_html: false

format.string: Configurable format string used to create a custom formatted message.

Example configurable that uses the format codec to print the events timestamp and message field to console:

output.console:
  codec.format:
    string: '%{[@timestamp]} %{[message]}'

compression

Select a compression codec to use. Supported codecs are snappy, lz4 and gzip.

compression_level

For the gzip codec you can choose a compression level. The level must be in the range of 1 (best speed) to 9 (best compression).

Increasing the compression level reduces the network usage but increases the CPU usage.

Default: 4.

keep_alive

(string) The keep-alive period for an active network connection. If 0s, keep-alives are disabled.

Default: 0s

max_message_bytes

(int) The maximum permitted size of JSON-encoded messages. Bigger messages will be dropped. This value should be equal to or less than the broker’s message.max.bytes.

Default: 1000000 (bytes)

metadata

Kafka metadata update settings. The metadata contains information about brokers, topics, partition, and active leaders to use for publishing.

required_acks

The ACK reliability level required from broker. 0=no response, 1=wait for local commit, -1=wait for all replicas to commit. The default is 1.

Note: If set to 0, no ACKs are returned by Kafka. Messages might be lost silently on error.

Default: 1 (wait for local commit)

timeout

The number of seconds to wait for responses from the Kafka brokers before timing out. The default is 30 (seconds).

Default: 1000000 (bytes)