Product release

What's new in Logstash 7.9.0

By
Alvin Chen

We are happy to announce the general availability of the Logstash 7.9.0 release. This is the latest stable release and is now available for download! Please refer to the release notes for the complete list of bug fixes and features.

Faster pipeline startups and restarts 

For some time now, we have heard clear feedback from our users that the compilation of complex Logstash pipelines may take extended periods of time to execute, effectively resulting in longer startup and restart times. In the Logstash 7.9.0 release, we are excited to introduce some substantial optimizations to pipeline compilation that result in over 9x faster pipeline startups and restarts. This should help streamline the pipeline development workflow and enhance overall operational excellence.

Through our tests with three different real world pipelines running 8 workers each, we have seen pipeline compilation time reduced from up to 28 minutes down to just around a minute. For deeper technical details regarding these optimizations, please see this PR. Additionally, to assist with pipeline development and better understanding of the performance impact of compilation, Logstash now logs the time taken to compile each pipeline: 

[2020-08-12T14:10:29,388][INFO ][logstash.javapipeline    ][main] Pipeline Java execution initialization time {"seconds"=>0.7}

Unlock more application search use cases

With this Logstash release, we have taken the opportunity to completely revamp the Elastic App Search output plugin with a more robust Ruby client library and greatly expanded integration testing coverage. This enables our users to unlock application search on their datasets that may currently reside in existing databases, raw/blob storage, and messaging queues. It also allows for an easy migration path from a custom Elasticsearch application search use case to Elastic App Search. This plugin has now graduated to a tier 1 plugin and is compatible with Elastic App Search 7.x

logstash-app-search-blog.png

Continued API key support

Following up on the Logstash 7.8.0 release where we added API key support for the Elasticsearch output plugin, Logstash 7.9.0 introduces additional API key support for the Elasticsearch input, Elasticsearch filter, Logstash monitoring, and central pipeline management.

Please check out the documentation for more information about using API keys with Logstash and Elasticsearch.

Support for ARM/AARCH64

We always try our best to meet our users where they are, and with this release we continue down the path of making Logstash available on more platforms. The Logstash binaries are now tested to work against ARM/AARCH64 systems. This is only the initial step of the journey, and we are looking to offer Docker and other images in the near future as well. ARM/AARCH64 support is currently offered as experimental and therefore not yet recommended for production environments.

Please consult our support matrix for the full list of operating systems that Logstash supports.

Try it yourself!

Please download Logstash 7.9.0, try it, and let us know what you think on Twitter (@elastic) or in our forums and community Slack. You can report any bugs or feature requests on the Logstash Github issues page or within the respective plugin repositories.