WARNING: Version 1.1 of Filebeat has passed its EOL date.

This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be removed. If you are running this version, we strongly advise you to upgrade. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.

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Step 2: Configuring Filebeat

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Step 2: Configuring Filebeat

edit

To configure Filebeat, you edit the configuration file. For rpm and deb, you’ll find the configuration file at /etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml. For mac and win, look in the archive that you just extracted.

Here is a sample of the filebeat section of the filebeat.yml file. Filebeat uses predefined default values for most configuration options.

filebeat:
  # List of prospectors to fetch data.
  prospectors:
    # Each - is a prospector. Below are the prospector specific configurations
    -
      # Paths that should be crawled and fetched. Glob based paths.
      # For each file found under this path, a harvester is started.
      paths:
        - "/var/log/*.log"
        #- c:\programdata\elasticsearch\logs\*

      # Type of the files. Based on this the way the file is read is decided.
      # The different types cannot be mixed in one prospector
      #
      # Possible options are:
      # * log: Reads every line of the log file (default)
      # * stdin: Reads the standard in
      input_type: log

To configure Filebeat:

Define the path (or paths) to your log files.

For the most basic Filebeat configuration, you can define a single prospector with a single path. For example:
```
filebeat:
  prospectors:
    -
      paths:
        - "/var/log/*.log"
```
The prospector in this example harvests all files in the path /var/log/*.log, which means that Filebeat will harvest all files in the directory /var/log/ that end with .log. All patterns supported by Golang Glob are also supported here.

To fetch all files from a predefined level of subdirectories, the following pattern can be used: /var/log/*/*.log. This fetches all .log files from the subfolders of /var/log. It does not fetch log files from the /var/log folder itself. Currently it is not possible to recursively fetch all files in all subdirectories of a directory.

If you are sending output to Elasticsearch, set the IP address and port where Filebeat can find the Elasticsearch installation:

# Configure what outputs to use when sending the data collected by the beat.
# Multiple outputs may be used.
output:
  ### Elasticsearch as output
  elasticsearch:
    # Array of hosts to connect to.
     hosts: ["192.168.1.42:9200"]

If you are sending output to Logstash, see Step 3 (Optional): Configuring Filebeat to Use Logstash instead.

See Configuration Options for more details about each configuration option.

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