Functionbeat reached End of Support on October 18, 2023. You must consider moving your deployments to the more versatile and efficient Elastic Serverless Forwarder.

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Functionbeat quick start: installation and configuration

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Functionbeat quick start: installation and configuration

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This guide describes how to get started quickly monitoring data from your cloud services. You’ll learn how to:

download the Functionbeat distribution
configure details about the cloud functions you want to deploy, including the services to monitor and triggers
deploy the cloud functions to your serverless environment
collect data from cloud services and ship it to the Elastic Stack
visualize the data in Kibana

Step 1: Download Functionbeat

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The Functionbeat distribution contains the command line tools, configuration file, and binary code required to run Functionbeat in your serverless environment.

To download and extract the package, use the commands that work with your system.

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/functionbeat/functionbeat-8.13.4-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzvf functionbeat-8.13.4-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/functionbeat/functionbeat-8.13.4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzvf functionbeat-8.13.4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Download the Functionbeat Windows zip file from the downloads page.
Extract the contents of the zip file into C:\Program Files.

The commands shown are for AMD platforms, but ARM packages are also available. Refer to the download page for the full list of available packages.

Step 2: Connect to the Elastic Stack

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Connections to Elasticsearch and Kibana are required to set up Functionbeat.

Set the connection information in functionbeat.yml. To locate this configuration file, see Directory layout.

Specify the cloud.id of your Elasticsearch Service, and set cloud.auth to a user who is authorized to set up Functionbeat. For example:

cloud.id: "staging:dXMtZWFzdC0xLmF3cy5mb3VuZC5pbyRjZWM2ZjI2MWE3NGJmMjRjZTMzYmI4ODExYjg0Mjk0ZiRjNmMyY2E2ZDA0MjI0OWFmMGNjN2Q3YTllOTYyNTc0Mw=="
cloud.auth: "functionbeat_setup:YOUR_PASSWORD"

This examples shows a hard-coded password, but you should store sensitive values in environment variables.

Set the host and port where Functionbeat can find the Elasticsearch installation, and set the username and password of a user who is authorized to set up Functionbeat. For example:

output.elasticsearch:
  hosts: ["https://myEShost:9200"]
  username: "functionbeat_internal"
  password: "YOUR_PASSWORD" 
  ssl:
    enabled: true
    ca_trusted_fingerprint: "b9a10bbe64ee9826abeda6546fc988c8bf798b41957c33d05db736716513dc9c"

This example shows a hard-coded password, but you should store sensitive values in environment variables.

This example shows a hard-coded fingerprint, but you should store sensitive values in environment variables. The fingerprint is a HEX encoded SHA-256 of a CA certificate, when you start Elasticsearch for the first time, security features such as network encryption (TLS) for Elasticsearch are enabled by default. If you are using the self-signed certificate generated by Elasticsearch when it is started for the first time, you will need to add its fingerprint here. The fingerprint is printed on Elasticsearch start up logs, or you can refer to connect clients to Elasticsearch documentation for other options on retrieving it. If you are providing your own SSL certificate to Elasticsearch refer to Functionbeat documentation on how to setup SSL.

If you plan to use our pre-built Kibana dashboards, configure the Kibana endpoint. Skip this step if Kibana is running on the same host as Elasticsearch.

  setup.kibana:
    host: "mykibanahost:5601" 
    username: "my_kibana_user"  
    password: "{pwd}"

	The hostname and port of the machine where Kibana is running, for example, `mykibanahost:5601`. If you specify a path after the port number, include the scheme and port: `http://mykibanahost:5601/path`.
	The `username` and `password` settings for Kibana are optional. If you don’t specify credentials for Kibana, Functionbeat uses the `username` and `password` specified for the Elasticsearch output.
	To use the pre-built Kibana dashboards, this user must be authorized to view dashboards or have the `kibana_admin` built-in role.

To learn more about required roles and privileges, see Grant users access to secured resources.

You can send data to other outputs, such as Logstash, but that requires additional configuration and setup.

Step 3: Configure cloud functions

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Before deploying Functionbeat to your cloud provider, you need to specify details about the cloud functions that you want to deploy, including the function name and type, and the triggers that will cause the function to execute.

In functionbeat.yml, configure the functions that you want to deploy. The configuration settings vary depending on the type of function and cloud provider you’re using. This section provides a an AWS example configuration.

This example configures a function called cloudwatch that collects events from CloudWatch Logs. When a message is sent to the specified log group, the cloud function executes and sends message events to the configured output:

functionbeat.provider.aws.endpoint: "s3.amazonaws.com"
functionbeat.provider.aws.deploy_bucket: "functionbeat-deploy" 
functionbeat.provider.aws.functions:
  - name: cloudwatch 
    enabled: true
    type: cloudwatch_logs
    description: "lambda function for cloudwatch logs"
    triggers:
      - log_group_name: /aws/lambda/my-lambda-function

	A unique name for the S3 bucket to which the functions will be uploaded.
	Details about the function you want to deploy, including the name of the function, the type of service to monitor, and the log groups that trigger the function.

See AWS functions for more examples.

To test your configuration file, change to the directory where the Functionbeat binary is installed, and run Functionbeat in the foreground with the following options specified: ./functionbeat test config -e. Make sure your config files are in the path expected by Functionbeat (see Directory layout), or use the -c flag to specify the path to the config file.

For more information about configuring Functionbeat, also see:

Configure Functionbeat
Config file format
functionbeat.reference.yml: This reference configuration file shows all non-deprecated options. You’ll find it in the same location as functionbeat.yml.

Step 4: Set up assets

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Functionbeat comes with predefined assets for parsing, indexing, and visualizing your data. To load these assets:

Make sure the user specified in functionbeat.yml is authorized to set up Functionbeat.
From the installation directory, run:
```
./functionbeat setup -e
```
```
./functionbeat setup -e
```
```
PS > .\functionbeat.exe setup -e
```
-e is optional and sends output to standard error instead of the configured log output.

This step loads the recommended index template for writing to Elasticsearch.

A connection to Elasticsearch (or Elasticsearch Service) is required to set up the initial environment. If you’re using a different output, such as Logstash, see Load the index template manually.

Step 5: Deploy Functionbeat

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To deploy Functionbeat functions to your cloud provider, either use the Functionbeat manager, as described here, or use your own deployment infrastructure.

If you change the configuration after deploying the function, use the update command to update your deployment.

Deploy to AWS

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Make sure you have the credentials required to authenticate with AWS. You can set environment variables that contain your credentials:

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPUSER
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=EXAMPLE567890devgHIJKMLOPNQRSTUVZ1234KEY
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPUSER
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=EXAMPLE567890devgHIJKMLOPNQRSTUVZ1234KEY
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1

set AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPUSER
set AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=EXAMPLE567890devgHIJKMLOPNQRSTUVZ1234KEY
set AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-east-1

Set AWS_DEFAULT_REGION to the region where your services are running.

Make sure the user has the permissions required to deploy and run the function. For more information, see IAM permissions required for deployment.
Deploy the cloud functions.

For example, the following command deploys a function called cloudwatch:
```
./functionbeat -v -e -d "*" deploy cloudwatch
```
```
./functionbeat -v -e -d "*" deploy cloudwatch
```
```
.\functionbeat.exe -v -e -d "*" deploy cloudwatch
```
The function is deployed to AWS and ready to send log events to the configured output.

If deployment fails, see Common problems for help troubleshooting.

Step 6: View your data in Kibana

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There are currently no example dashboards available for Functionbeat.

To learn how to view and explore your data, see the Kibana User Guide.

What’s next?

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Now that you have your cloud data streaming into Elasticsearch, learn how to unify your logs, metrics, uptime, and application performance data.

Ingest data from other sources by installing and configuring other Elastic Beats:

Elastic Beats	To capture
Metricbeat	Infrastructure metrics
Filebeat	Logs
Winlogbeat	Windows event logs
Heartbeat	Uptime information
APM	Application performance metrics
Auditbeat	Audit events

Use the Observability apps in Kibana to search across all your data:

Elastic apps	Use to
Metrics app	Explore metrics about systems and services across your ecosystem
Logs app	Tail related log data in real time
Uptime app	Monitor availability issues across your apps and services
APM app	Monitor application performance
SIEM app	Analyze security events

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