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Elastic Docs ›Filebeat Reference [8.11] ›Modules

System module

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System module

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Prefer to use Elastic Agent for this use case?

Refer to the Elastic Integrations documentation.

Learn more

Elastic Agent is a single, unified way to add monitoring for logs, metrics, and other types of data to a host. It can also protect hosts from security threats, query data from operating systems, forward data from remote services or hardware, and more. Refer to the documentation for a detailed comparison of Beats and Elastic Agent.

The system module collects and parses logs created by the system logging service of common Unix/Linux based distributions.

When you run the module, it performs a few tasks under the hood:

  • Sets the default paths to the log files (but don’t worry, you can override the defaults)
  • Makes sure each multiline log event gets sent as a single event
  • Uses an Elasticsearch ingest pipeline to parse and process the log lines, shaping the data into a structure suitable for visualizing in Kibana
  • Deploys dashboards for visualizing the log data

Read the quick start to learn how to configure and run modules.

Compatibility

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This module was tested with logs from OSes like Ubuntu 12.04, Centos 7, and macOS Sierra.

This module is not available for Windows.

Configure the module

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You can further refine the behavior of the system module by specifying variable settings in the modules.d/system.yml file, or overriding settings at the command line.

You must enable at least one fileset in the module. Filesets are disabled by default.

The following example shows how to set paths in the modules.d/system.yml file to override the default paths for the syslog and authorization logs:

- module: system
  syslog:
    enabled: true
    var.paths: ["/path/to/log/syslog*"]
  auth:
    enabled: true
    var.paths: ["/path/to/log/auth.log*"]

To specify the same settings at the command line, you use:

-M "system.syslog.var.paths=[/path/to/log/syslog*]" -M "system.auth.var.paths=[/path/to/log/auth.log*]"

Variable settings

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Each fileset has separate variable settings for configuring the behavior of the module. If you don’t specify variable settings, the system module uses the defaults.

For advanced use cases, you can also override input settings. See Override input settings.

When you specify a setting at the command line, remember to prefix the setting with the module name, for example, system.syslog.var.paths instead of syslog.var.paths.

syslog fileset settings

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var.paths
An array of glob-based paths that specify where to look for the log files. All patterns supported by Go Glob are also supported here. For example, you can use wildcards to fetch all files from a predefined level of subdirectories: /path/to/log/*/*.log. This fetches all .log files from the subfolders of /path/to/log. It does not fetch log files from the /path/to/log folder itself. If this setting is left empty, Filebeat will choose log paths based on your operating system.

auth fileset settings

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var.paths
An array of glob-based paths that specify where to look for the log files. All patterns supported by Go Glob are also supported here. For example, you can use wildcards to fetch all files from a predefined level of subdirectories: /path/to/log/*/*.log. This fetches all .log files from the subfolders of /path/to/log. It does not fetch log files from the /path/to/log folder itself. If this setting is left empty, Filebeat will choose log paths based on your operating system.
var.tags
A list of tags to include in events. Including forwarded indicates that the events did not originate on this host and causes host.name to not be added to events. Include preserve_orginal_event causes the pipeline to retain the raw log in event.original. Defaults to [].

Time zone support

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This module parses logs that don’t contain time zone information. For these logs, Filebeat reads the local time zone and uses it when parsing to convert the timestamp to UTC. The time zone to be used for parsing is included in the event in the event.timezone field.

To disable this conversion, the event.timezone field can be removed with the drop_fields processor.

If logs are originated from systems or applications with a different time zone to the local one, the event.timezone field can be overwritten with the original time zone using the add_fields processor.

See Processors for information about specifying processors in your config.

Example dashboards

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This module comes with sample dashboards. For example:

kibana system

Fields

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For a description of each field in the module, see the exported fields section.

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