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UDP input

UDP input

Use the udp input to read events over UDP.

Example configuration:

filebeat.inputs:
- type: udp
  max_message_size: 10KiB
  host: "localhost:8080"

Configuration options

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

`max_message_size`

The maximum size of the message received over UDP. The default is 10KiB.

`host`

The host and UDP port to listen on for event streams.

`network`

The network type. Acceptable values are: "udp" (default), "udp4", "udp6"

`read_buffer`

The size of the read buffer on the UDP socket. If not specified the default from the operating system will be used.

`timeout`

The read and write timeout for socket operations. The default is 5m.

Metrics

This input exposes metrics under the HTTP monitoring endpoint. These metrics are exposed under the /inputs path. They can be used to observe the activity of the input.

Metric	Description
`device`	Host/port of the UDP stream.
`udp_read_buffer_length_gauge`	Size of the UDP socket buffer length in bytes (gauge).
`received_events_total`	Total number of packets (events) that have been received.
`received_bytes_total`	Total number of bytes received.
`receive_queue_length`	Aggregated size of the system receive queues (IPv4 and IPv6) (linux only) (gauge).
`system_packet_drops`	Aggregated number of system packet drops (IPv4 and IPv6) (linux only) (gauge).
`arrival_period`	Histogram of the time between successive packets in nanoseconds.
`processing_time`	Histogram of the time taken to process packets in nanoseconds.

Common options

The following configuration options are supported by all inputs.

`enabled`

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

`tags`

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: udp
  . . .
  tags: ["json"]

`fields`

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: udp
  . . .
  fields:
    app_id: query_engine_12

`fields_under_root`

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`

A list of processors to apply to the input data.

See Processors for information about specifying processors in your config.

`pipeline`

The ingest 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`

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`

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".

`publisher_pipeline.disable_host`

By default, all events contain host.name. This option can be set to true to disable the addition of this field to all events. The default value is false.

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