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Elastic Docs ›Filebeat Reference [7.4] ›Configuring Filebeat

Enrich events with geoIP information

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Enrich events with geoIP information

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You can use Filebeat along with the GeoIP Processor in Elasticsearch to export geographic location information based on IP addresses. Then you can use this information to visualize the location of IP addresses on a map in Kibana.

The geoip processor adds information about the geographical location of IP addresses, based on data from the Maxmind GeoLite2 City Database. Because the processor uses a geoIP database that’s installed on Elasticsearch, you don’t need to install a geoIP database on the machines running Filebeat.

If your use case involves using Logstash, you can use the GeoIP filter available in Logstash instead of using the geoip processor. However, using the geoip processor is the simplest approach when you don’t require the additional processing power of Logstash.

Configure the geoip processor

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To configure Filebeat and the geoip processor:

  1. Define an ingest node pipeline that uses one or more geoip processors to add location information to the event. For example, you can use the Console in Kibana to create the following pipeline:

    PUT _ingest/pipeline/geoip-info
{
  "description": "Add geoip info",
  "processors": [
    {
      "geoip": {
        "field": "client.ip",
        "target_field": "client.geo",
        "ignore_missing": true
      }
    },
    {
      "geoip": {
        "field": "source.ip",
        "target_field": "source.geo",
        "ignore_missing": true
      }
    },
    {
      "geoip": {
        "field": "destination.ip",
        "target_field": "destination.geo",
        "ignore_missing": true
      }
    },
    {
      "geoip": {
        "field": "server.ip",
        "target_field": "server.geo",
        "ignore_missing": true
      }
    },
    {
      "geoip": {
        "field": "host.ip",
        "target_field": "host.geo",
        "ignore_missing": true
      }
    }
  ]
}
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    In this example, the pipeline ID is geoip-info. field specifies the field that contains the IP address to use for the geographical lookup, and target_field is the field that will hold the geographical information. "ignore_missing": true configures the pipeline to continue processing when it encounters an event that doesn’t have the specified field.

    See GeoIP Processor for more options.

    To learn more about adding host information to an event, see Add Host metadata.

  2. In the Filebeat config file, configure the Elasticsearch output to use the pipeline. Specify the pipeline ID in the pipeline option under output.elasticsearch. For example:

    output.elasticsearch:
  hosts: ["localhost:9200"]
  pipeline: geoip-info

  3. Run Filebeat. Remember to use sudo if the config file is owned by root.

    ./filebeat -e

    If the lookups succeed, the events are enriched with geo_point fields, such as client.geo.location and host.geo.location, that you can use to populate visualizations in Kibana.

If you add a field that’s not already defined as a geo_point in the index template, add a mapping so the field gets indexed correctly.

Visualize locations

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To visualize the location of IP addresses, you can create a new coordinate map in Kibana and select the location field, for example client.geo.location or host.geo.location, as the Geohash.

Coordinate map in Kibana
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