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Exporting GeoIP Information

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Exporting GeoIP Information

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You can use Packetbeat along with the ingest geoIP processor plugin in Elasticsearch to export geographic location information about source IPs for incoming HTTP requests. Then you can use this info to visualize the location of your clients on a map in Kibana.

Prior to version 5.0, Packetbeat provided a geoip configuration option for exporting geoIP information about the source IPs. Starting with 5.0, the geoip configuration option in Beats is deprecated in favor of using the ingest geoIP processor plugin. This plugin adds information about the geographical location of IP addresses, based on data from the Maxmind GeoLite2 City Database. Because the plugin uses a geoIP database that’s installed on Elasticsearch, you no longer need to install a geoIP database on the machines running Beats.

If your use case involves using Logstash, you can use the GeoIP filter available in Logstash instead of using the ingest plugin. However, using the ingest plugin is the simplest approach when you don’t require the additional processing power of Logstash.

Configuring the Ingest GeoIP Processor Plugin

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To configure Packetbeat and the ingest geoIP processor plugin:

Install the ingest geoIP processor plugin. After installing the plugin, remember to restart the node.
Define an ingest node pipeline that uses a geoip processor to add location info to the event. For example, you can use the Console in Kibana to create the following pipeline:
```
PUT _ingest/pipeline/geoip-info
{
  "description": "Add geoip info",
  "processors": [
    {
      "geoip": {
        "field": "client_ip",
        "target_field": "client_geoip",
        "properties": ["location"],
        "ignore_failure": true
      }
    }
  ]
}
```
This pipeline adds a client_geoip.location field of type geo_point to the event. The ID of the pipeline is geoip-info. client_ip is the output field in Packetbeat that contains the IP address of the client. You set ignore_failure to true so that the pipeline will continue processing events when it encounters an event that doesn’t have a client_ip field.

See Using the Geoip Processor in a Pipeline for more options.
In the Packetbeat config file, configure the Elasticsearch output to use the pipeline. Specify the pipeline ID in the pipeline option under output.elasticsearch. For example:
```
output.elasticsearch:
  hosts: ["localhost:9200"]
  pipeline: geoip-info
```
Run Packetbeat, passing in the configuration file that you updated earlier.
```
./packetbeat -e -c packetbeat.yml
```
The event that’s sent to Elasticsearch should now include a client_geoip.location field.

Visualizing the Location of Your Packetbeat Clients

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To visualize the location of your Packetbeat clients, you can either import the Kibana dashboard for Packetbeat (if you haven’t already), or create a new Tile map in Kibana and use the client_geoip.location field as the Geohash.

Update Packetbeat client location map in Kibana

If the map in the dashboard reports "no results found", and you don’t see client_geoip.location in the list of available Geohash fields, try refreshing the field list in Kibana. On the Management tab, select the packetbeat-* index pattern, and refresh the field list to pick up any fields that were added by the ingest geoIP processor.

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