Configure logging

The logging section of the winlogbeat.yml config file contains options for configuring the logging output. The logging system can write logs to the syslog or rotate log files. If logging is not explicitly configured the file output is used.

logging.level: info
logging.to_files: true
logging.files:
  path: C:\ProgramData\winlogbeat\Logs
  name: winlogbeat
  keepfiles: 7
  permissions: 0640

You can specify the following options in the logging section of the winlogbeat.yml config file:

When true, writes all logging output to standard error output. This is equivalent to using the -e command line option.

When true, writes all logging output to the syslog.

When true, writes all logging output to the Windows Event Log.

When true, writes all logging output to files. The log files are automatically rotated when the log file size limit is reached.

Minimum log level. One of debug, info, warning, or error. The default log level is info.

The list of debugging-only selector tags used by different Winlogbeat components. Use * to enable debug output for all components. Use publisher to display debug messages related to event publishing.

To configure multiple selectors, use the following YAML list syntax:

logging.selectors: [ harvester, input ]

To override selectors at the command line, use the -d global flag (-d also sets the debug log level). For more information, see Command reference.

By default, Winlogbeat periodically logs its internal metrics that have changed in the last period. For each metric that changed, the delta from the value at the beginning of the period is logged. Also, the total values for all non-zero internal metrics are logged on shutdown. Set this to false to disable this behavior. The default is true.

Here is an example log line:

2017-12-17T19:17:42.667-0500    INFO    [metrics]       log/log.go:110  Non-zero metrics in the last 30s: beat.info.uptime.ms=30004 beat.memstats.gc_next=5046416

Note that we currently offer no backwards compatible guarantees for the internal metrics and for this reason they are also not documented.

The period after which to log the internal metrics. The default is 30s.

A list of metrics namespaces to report in the logs. Defaults to [stats]. stats contains general Beat metrics. dataset may be present in some Beats and contains module or input metrics.

The directory that log files are written to. The default is the logs path. See the Directory layout section for details.

The name of the file that logs are written to. The default is winlogbeat.

The maximum size of a log file. If the limit is reached, a new log file is generated. The default size limit is 10485760 (10 MB).

The number of most recent rotated log files to keep on disk. Older files are deleted during log rotation. The default value is 7. The keepfiles options has to be in the range of 2 to 1024 files.

The permissions mask to apply when rotating log files. The default value is 0600. The permissions option must be a valid Unix-style file permissions mask expressed in octal notation. In Go, numbers in octal notation must start with 0.

The most permissive mask allowed is 0640. If a higher permissions mask is specified via this setting, it will be subject to an umask of 0027.

This option is not supported on Windows.

Examples:

Enable log file rotation on time intervals in addition to size-based rotation. Intervals must be at least 1s. Values of 1m, 1h, 24h, 7*24h, 30*24h, and 365*24h are boundary-aligned with minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years as reported by the local system clock. All other intervals are calculated from the unix epoch. Defaults to disabled.

If the log file already exists on startup, immediately rotate it and start writing to a new file instead of appending to the existing one. Defaults to true.

When true, diagnostic messages printed to Winlogbeat’s standard error output will also be logged to the log file. This can be helpful in situations were Winlogbeat terminates unexpectedly because an error has been detected by Go’s runtime but diagnostic information is not present in the log file. This feature is only available when logging to files (logging.to_files is true). Disabled by default.

The logging format is generally the same for each logging output. The one exception is with the syslog output where the timestamp is not included in the message because syslog adds its own timestamp.

Each log message consists of the following parts:

Below are some samples:

2017-12-17T18:54:16.241-0500 INFO logp/core_test.go:13 unnamed global logger

2017-12-17T18:54:16.242-0500 INFO [example] logp/core_test.go:16 some message

2017-12-17T18:54:16.242-0500 INFO [example] logp/core_test.go:19 some message {"x": 1}