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Elastic Docs ›Filebeat Reference [7.6] ›Modules

Nginx module

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Nginx module

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The nginx module parses access and error logs created by the Nginx HTTP server.

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 ingest node 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 set up and run modules.

Compatibility

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The Nginx module was tested with logs from version 1.10.

On Windows, the module was tested with Nginx installed from the Chocolatey repository.

Configure the module

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

The following example shows how to set paths in the modules.d/nginx.yml file to override the default paths for access logs and error logs:

- module: nginx
  access:
    enabled: true
    var.paths: ["/path/to/log/nginx/access.log*"]
  error:
    enabled: true
    var.paths: ["/path/to/log/nginx/error.log*"]

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

-M "nginx.access.var.paths=[/path/to/log/nginx/access.log*]" -M "nginx.error.var.paths=[/path/to/log/nginx/error.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 nginx module uses the defaults.

For more information, see Configure variable settings. Also see Override input settings.

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

access log 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.

error log fileset

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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.

Timezone support

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This module parses logs that don’t contain timezone information. For these logs, Filebeat reads the local timezone and uses it when parsing to convert the timestamp to UTC. The timezone 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 timezone to the local one, the event.timezone field can be overwritten with the original timezone using the add_fields processor.

See Processors for information about specifying processors in your config.

Example dashboard

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This module comes with sample dashboards. For example:

kibana nginx

Fields

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

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