Add cloud metadata

The add_cloud_metadata processor enriches each event with instance metadata from the machine’s hosting provider. At startup it will query a list of hosting providers and cache the instance metadata.

The following cloud providers are supported:

huawei is an alias for openstack. Huawei cloud runs on OpenStack platform, and when viewed from a metadata API standpoint, it is impossible to differentiate it from OpenStack. If you know that your deployments run on Huawei Cloud exclusively, and you wish to have cloud.provider value as huawei, you can achieve this by overwriting the value using an add_fields processor.

The Alibaba Cloud and Tencent cloud providers are disabled by default, because they require to access a remote host. The providers setting allows users to select a list of default providers to query.

Cloud providers tend to maintain metadata services compliant with other cloud providers. For example, Openstack supports EC2 compliant metadat service. This makes it impossible to differentiate cloud provider (cloud.provider property) with auto discovery (when providers configuration is omitted). The processor implementation incorporates a priority mechanism where priority is given to some providers over others when there are multiple successful metadata results. Currently, aws/ec2 and azure have priority over any other provider as their metadata retrival rely on SDKs. The expectation here is that SDK methods should fail if run in an environment not configured accordingly (ex:- missing configurations or credentials).

The simple configuration below enables the processor.

processors:
  - add_cloud_metadata: ~

The add_cloud_metadata processor has three optional configuration settings. The first one is timeout which specifies the maximum amount of time to wait for a successful response when detecting the hosting provider. The default timeout value is 3s.

If a timeout occurs then no instance metadata will be added to the events. This makes it possible to enable this processor for all your deployments (in the cloud or on-premise).

The second optional setting is providers. The providers settings accepts a list of cloud provider names to be used. If providers is not configured, then all providers that do not access a remote endpoint are enabled by default. The list of providers may alternatively be configured with the environment variable BEATS_ADD_CLOUD_METADATA_PROVIDERS, by setting it to a comma-separated list of provider names.

List of names the providers setting supports:

For example, configuration below only utilize aws metadata retrival mechanism,

processors:
  - add_cloud_metadata:
      providers:
        aws

The third optional configuration setting is overwrite. When overwrite is true, add_cloud_metadata overwrites existing cloud.* fields (false by default).

The add_cloud_metadata processor supports SSL options to configure the http client used to query cloud metadata. See SSL for more information.

The metadata that is added to events varies by hosting provider. Below are examples for each of the supported providers.

AWS

Metadata given below are extracted from instance identity document,

{
  "cloud": {
    "account.id": "123456789012",
    "availability_zone": "us-east-1c",
    "instance.id": "i-4e123456",
    "machine.type": "t2.medium",
    "image.id": "ami-abcd1234",
    "provider": "aws",
    "region": "us-east-1"
  }
}

If the EC2 instance has IMDS enabled and if tags are allowed through IMDS endpoint, the processor will further append tags in metadata. Please refer official documentation on IMDS endpoint for further details.

{
  "aws": {
    "tags": {
      "org" : "myOrg",
      "owner": "userID"
    }
  }
}

Digital Ocean

{
  "cloud": {
    "instance.id": "1234567",
    "provider": "digitalocean",
    "region": "nyc2"
  }
}

GCP

{
  "cloud": {
    "availability_zone": "us-east1-b",
    "instance.id": "1234556778987654321",
    "machine.type": "f1-micro",
    "project.id": "my-dev",
    "provider": "gcp"
  }
}

Tencent Cloud

{
  "cloud": {
    "availability_zone": "gz-azone2",
    "instance.id": "ins-qcloudv5",
    "provider": "qcloud",
    "region": "china-south-gz"
  }
}

Alibaba Cloud

This metadata is only available when VPC is selected as the network type of the ECS instance.

{
  "cloud": {
    "availability_zone": "cn-shenzhen",
    "instance.id": "i-wz9g2hqiikg0aliyun2b",
    "provider": "ecs",
    "region": "cn-shenzhen-a"
  }
}

Azure Virtual Machine

{
  "cloud": {
    "provider": "azure",
    "instance.id": "04ab04c3-63de-4709-a9f9-9ab8c0411d5e",
    "instance.name": "test-az-vm",
    "machine.type": "Standard_D3_v2",
    "region": "eastus2"
  }
}

Openstack Nova

{
  "cloud": {
    "instance.name": "test-998d932195.mycloud.tld",
    "instance.id": "i-00011a84",
    "availability_zone": "xxxx-az-c",
    "provider": "openstack",
    "machine.type": "m2.large"
  }
}

Hetzner Cloud

{
  "cloud": {
    "availability_zone": "hel1-dc2",
    "instance.name": "my-hetzner-instance",
    "instance.id": "111111",
    "provider": "hetzner",
    "region": "eu-central"
  }
}