HTTP JSON input

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This functionality is in beta and is subject to change. The design and code is less mature than official GA features and is being provided as-is with no warranties. Beta features are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

Use the httpjson input to read messages from an HTTP API with JSON payloads.

For example, this input is used to retrieve MISP threat indicators in the Filebeat MISP module.

This input supports retrieval at a configurable interval and pagination.

Example configurations:

filebeat.inputs:
# Fetch your public IP every minute.
- type: httpjson
  url: https://api.ipify.org/?format=json
  interval: 1m
  processors:
    - decode_json_fields
        fields: [message]
        target: json
filebeat.inputs:
- type: httpjson
  url: http://localhost:9200/_search?scroll=5m
  http_method: POST
  json_objects_array: hits.hits
  pagination:
    extra_body_content:
      scroll: 5m
    id_field: _scroll_id
    req_field: scroll_id
    url: http://localhost:9200/_search/scroll

Configuration options

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The httpjson input supports the following configuration options plus the Common options described later.

api_key

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API key to access the HTTP API. When set, this adds an Authorization header to the HTTP request with this as the value.

http_client_timeout

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Duration before declaring that the HTTP client connection has timed out. Defaults to 60s. Valid time units are ns, us, ms, s (default), m, h.

http_headers

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Additional HTTP headers to set in the requests. The default value is null (no additional headers).

- type: httpjson
  http_headers:
    Authorization: 'Basic aGVsbG86d29ybGQ='

http_method

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HTTP method to use when making requests. GET or POST are the options. Defaults to GET.

http_request_body

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An optional HTTP POST body. The configuration value must be an object, and it will be encoded to JSON. This is only valid when http_method is POST. Defaults to null (no HTTP body).

- type: httpjson
  http_method: POST
  http_request_body:
    query:
      bool:
        filter:
          term:
            type: authentication

interval

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Duration between repeated requests. By default, the interval is 0 which means it performs a single request then stops. It may make additional pagination requests in response to the initial request if pagination is enabled.

json_objects_array

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If the response body contains a JSON object containing an array then this option specifies the key containing that array. Each object in that array will generate an event. This example response contains an array called events that we want to index.

{
  "time": "2020-06-02 23:22:32 UTC",
  "events": [
    {
      "timestamp": "2020-05-02 11:10:03 UTC",
      "event": {
        "category": "authorization"
      },
      "user": {
        "name": "fflintstone"
      }
    },
    {
      "timestamp": "2020-05-05 13:03:11 UTC",
      "event": {
        "category": "authorization"
      },
      "user": {
        "name": "brubble"
      }
    }
  ]
}

The config needs to specify events as the json_objects_array value.

- type: httpjson
  json_objects_array: events

no_http_body

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Force HTTP requests to be sent with an empty HTTP body. Defaults to false. This option cannot be used with http_request_body, pagination.extra_body_content, or pagination.req_field.

pagination.enabled

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The enabled setting can be used to disable the pagination configuration by setting it to false. The default value is true.

Pagination settings are disabled if either enabled is set to false or the pagination section is missing.

pagination.extra_body_content

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An object containing additional fields that should be included in the pagination request body. Defaults to null.

- type: httpjson
  pagination.extra_body_content:
    max_items: 500

pagination.header.field_name

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The name of the HTTP header in the response that is used for pagination control. The header value will be extracted from the response and used to make the next pagination response. pagination.header.regex_pattern can be used to select a subset of the value.

pagination.header.regex_pattern

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The regular expression pattern to use for retrieving the pagination information from the HTTP header field specified above. The first match becomes as the value.

pagination.id_field

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The name of a field in the JSON response body to use as the pagination ID. The value will be included in the next pagination request under the key specified by the pagination.req_field value.

pagination.req_field

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The name of the field to include in the pagination JSON request body containing the pagination ID defined by the pagination.id_field field.

pagination.url

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This specifies the URL for sending pagination requests. Defaults to the url value. This is only needed when the pagination requests need to be routed to a different URL.

rate_limit.limit

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This specifies the field in the HTTP header of the response that specifies the total limit.

rate_limit.remaining

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This specifies the field in the HTTP header of the response that specifies the remaining quota of the rate limit.

rate_limit.reset

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This specifies the field in the HTTP Header of the response that specifies the epoch time when the rate limit will reset.

ssl

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This specifies SSL/TLS configuration. If the ssl section is missing, the host’s CAs are used for HTTPS connections. See SSL for more information.

url

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The URL of the HTTP API. Required.

Common options

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The following configuration options are supported by all inputs.

enabled
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Use the enabled option to enable and disable inputs. By default, enabled is set to true.

tags
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A list of tags that Filebeat includes in the tags field of each published event. Tags make it easy to select specific events in Kibana or apply conditional filtering in Logstash. These tags will be appended to the list of tags specified in the general configuration.

Example:

filebeat.inputs:
- type: httpjson
  . . .
  tags: ["json"]
fields
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Optional fields that you can specify to add additional information to the output. For example, you might add fields that you can use for filtering log data. Fields can be scalar values, arrays, dictionaries, or any nested combination of these. By default, the fields that you specify here will be grouped under a fields sub-dictionary in the output document. To store the custom fields as top-level fields, set the fields_under_root option to true. If a duplicate field is declared in the general configuration, then its value will be overwritten by the value declared here.

filebeat.inputs:
- type: httpjson
  . . .
  fields:
    app_id: query_engine_12
fields_under_root
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If this option is set to true, the custom fields are stored as top-level fields in the output document instead of being grouped under a fields sub-dictionary. If the custom field names conflict with other field names added by Filebeat, then the custom fields overwrite the other fields.

processors
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A list of processors to apply to the input data.

See Processors for information about specifying processors in your config.

pipeline
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The Ingest Node pipeline ID to set for the events generated by this input.

The pipeline ID can also be configured in the Elasticsearch output, but this option usually results in simpler configuration files. If the pipeline is configured both in the input and output, the option from the input is used.

keep_null
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If this option is set to true, fields with null values will be published in the output document. By default, keep_null is set to false.

index
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If present, this formatted string overrides the index for events from this input (for elasticsearch outputs), or sets the raw_index field of the event’s metadata (for other outputs). This string can only refer to the agent name and version and the event timestamp; for access to dynamic fields, use output.elasticsearch.index or a processor.

Example value: "%{[agent.name]}-myindex-%{+yyyy.MM.dd}" might expand to "filebeat-myindex-2019.11.01".