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Elastic Docs ›Fleet and Elastic Agent Guide [8.x] ›Configure standalone Elastic Agents ›Configure outputs for standalone Elastic Agents

Kafka output

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Kafka output

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The Kafka output sends events to Apache Kafka.

Compatibility: This output can connect to Kafka version 0.8.2.0 and later. Older versions might work as well, but are not supported.

This example configures a Kafka output called kafka-output in the Elastic Agent elastic-agent.yml file, with settings as described further in:

outputs:
  kafka-output:
    type: kafka
    hosts:
      - 'kafka1:9092'
      - 'kafka2:9092'
      - 'kafka3:9092'
    client_id: Elastic
    version: 1.0.0
    compression: gzip
    compression_level: 4
    username: <my-kafka-username>
    password: <my-kakfa-password>
    sasl:
      mechanism: SCRAM-SHA-256
    partition:
      round_robin:
        group_events: 1
    topic: 'elastic-agent'
    headers: []
    timeout: 30
    broker_timeout: 30
    required_acks: 1
    ssl:
      verification_mode: full

Kafka output and using Logstash to index data to Elasticsearch

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If you are considering using Logstash to ship the data from kafka to Elasticsearch, please be aware the structure of the documents sent from Elastic Agent to kafka must not be modified by Logstash. We suggest disabling ecs_compatibility on both the kafka input and the json codec in order to make sure the input doesn’t edit the fields and their contents.

The data streams set up by the integrations expect to receive events having the same structure and field names as they were sent directly from an Elastic Agent.

Refer to Logstash output for Elastic Agent documentation for more details.

inputs {
  kafka {
    ...
    ecs_compatibility => "disabled"
    codec => json { ecs_compatibility => "disabled" }
    ...
  }
}
...

Kafka output configuration settings

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The kafka output supports the following settings, grouped by category. Many of these settings have sensible defaults that allow you to run Elastic Agent with minimal configuration.

Setting Description

enabled

(boolean) Enables or disables the output. If set to false, the output is disabled.

hosts

The addresses your Elastic Agents will use to connect to one or more Kafka brokers.

Following is an example hosts setting with three hosts defined:

    hosts:
      - 'localhost:9092'
      - 'mykafkahost01:9092'
      - 'mykafkahost02:9092'

version

Kafka protocol version that Elastic Agent will request when connecting. Defaults to 1.0.0.

The protocol version controls the Kafka client features available to Elastic Agent; it does not prevent Elastic Agent from connecting to Kafka versions newer than the protocol version.

Authentication settings

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Setting Description

username

The username for connecting to Kafka. If username is configured, the password must be configured as well.

password

The password for connecting to Kafka.

sasl.mechanism

The SASL mechanism to use when connecting to Kafka. It can be one of:

  • PLAIN for SASL/PLAIN.
  • SCRAM-SHA-256 for SCRAM-SHA-256.
  • SCRAM-SHA-512 for SCRAM-SHA-512. If sasl.mechanism is not set, PLAIN is used if username and password are provided. Otherwise, SASL authentication is disabled.

ssl

When sending data to a secured cluster through the kafka output, Elastic Agent can use SSL/TLS. For a list of available settings, refer to SSL/TLS, specifically the settings under Table 7, “Common configuration options” and Table 8, “Client configuration options”.

Memory queue settings

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The memory queue keeps all events in memory.

The memory queue waits for the output to acknowledge or drop events. If the queue is full, no new events can be inserted into the memory queue. Only after the signal from the output will the queue free up space for more events to be accepted.

The memory queue is controlled by the parameters flush.min_events and flush.timeout. flush.min_events gives a limit on the number of events that can be included in a single batch, and flush.timeout specifies how long the queue should wait to completely fill an event request. If the output supports a bulk_max_size parameter, the maximum batch size will be the smaller of bulk_max_size and flush.min_events.

flush.min_events is a legacy parameter, and new configurations should prefer to control batch size with bulk_max_size. As of 8.13, there is never a performance advantage to limiting batch size with flush.min_events instead of bulk_max_size.

In synchronous mode, an event request is always filled as soon as events are available, even if there are not enough events to fill the requested batch. This is useful when latency must be minimized. To use synchronous mode, set flush.timeout to 0.

For backwards compatibility, synchronous mode can also be activated by setting flush.min_events to 0 or 1. In this case, batch size will be capped at 1/2 the queue capacity.

In asynchronous mode, an event request will wait up to the specified timeout to try and fill the requested batch completely. If the timeout expires, the queue returns a partial batch with all available events. To use asynchronous mode, set flush.timeout to a positive duration, for example 5s.

This sample configuration forwards events to the output when there are enough events to fill the output’s request (usually controlled by bulk_max_size, and limited to at most 512 events by flush.min_events), or when events have been waiting for

  queue.mem.events: 4096
  queue.mem.flush.min_events: 512
  queue.mem.flush.timeout: 5s
Setting Description

queue.mem.events

The number of events the queue can store. This value should be evenly divisible by the smaller of queue.mem.flush.min_events or bulk_max_size to avoid sending partial batches to the output.

Default: 3200 events

queue.mem.flush.min_events

flush.min_events is a legacy parameter, and new configurations should prefer to control batch size with bulk_max_size. As of 8.13, there is never a performance advantage to limiting batch size with flush.min_events instead of bulk_max_size

Default: 1600 events

queue.mem.flush.timeout

(int) The maximum wait time for queue.mem.flush.min_events to be fulfilled. If set to 0s, events are available to the output immediately.

Default: 10s

Topics settings

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Use these options to set the Kafka topic for each Elastic Agent event.

Setting Description

topic

The default Kafka topic used for produced events.

Partition settings

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The number of partitions created is set automatically by the Kafka broker based on the list of topics. Records are then published to partitions either randomly, in round-robin order, or according to a calculated hash.

In the following example, after each event is published to a partition, the partitioner selects the next partition in round-robin fashion.

    partition:
      round_robin:
        group_events: 1
Setting Description

random.group_events

Sets the number of events to be published to the same partition, before the partitioner selects a new partition by random. The default value is 1 meaning after each event a new partition is picked randomly.

round_robin.group_events

Sets the number of events to be published to the same partition, before the partitioner selects the next partition. The default value is 1 meaning after each event the next partition will be selected.

hash.hash

List of fields used to compute the partitioning hash value from. If no field is configured, the events key value will be used.

hash.random

Randomly distribute events if no hash or key value can be computed.

Header settings

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A header is a key-value pair, and multiple headers can be included with the same key. Only string values are supported. These headers will be included in each produced Kafka message.

Setting Description

key

The key to set in the Kafka header.

value

The value to set in the Kafka header.

client_id

The configurable ClientID used for logging, debugging, and auditing purposes. The default is Elastic. The Client ID is part of the protocol to identify where the messages are coming from.

Other configuration settings

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You can specify these various other options in the kafka-output section of the agent configuration file.

Setting Description

backoff.init

(string) The number of seconds to wait before trying to reconnect to Kafka after a network error. After waiting backoff.init seconds, Elastic Agent tries to reconnect. If the attempt fails, the backoff timer is increased exponentially up to backoff.max. After a successful connection, the backoff timer is reset.

Default: 1s

backoff.max

(string) The maximum number of seconds to wait before attempting to connect to Kafka after a network error.

Default: 60s

broker_timeout

The maximum length of time a Kafka broker waits for the required number of ACKs before timing out (see the required_acks setting further in).

Default: 30 (seconds)

bulk_flush_frequency

(int) Duration to wait before sending bulk Kafka request. 0` is no delay.

Default: 0

bulk_max_size

(int) The maximum number of events to bulk in a single Kafka request.

Default: 2048

channel_buffer_size

(int) Per Kafka broker number of messages buffered in output pipeline.

Default: 256

codec

Output codec configuration. You can specify either the json or format codec. By default the json codec is used.

json.pretty: If pretty is set to true, events will be nicely formatted. The default is false.

json.escape_html: If escape_html is set to true, html symbols will be escaped in strings. The default is false.

Example configuration that uses the json codec with pretty printing enabled to write events to the console:

output.console:
  codec.json:
    pretty: true
    escape_html: false

format.string: Configurable format string used to create a custom formatted message.

Example configurable that uses the format codec to print the events timestamp and message field to console:

output.console:
  codec.format:
    string: '%{[@timestamp]} %{[message]}'

compression

Select a compression codec to use. Supported codecs are snappy, lz4 and gzip.

compression_level

For the gzip codec you can choose a compression level. The level must be in the range of 1 (best speed) to 9 (best compression).

Increasing the compression level reduces the network usage but increases the CPU usage.

Default: 4.

keep_alive

(string) The keep-alive period for an active network connection. If 0s, keep-alives are disabled.

Default: 0s

max_message_bytes

(int) The maximum permitted size of JSON-encoded messages. Bigger messages will be dropped. This value should be equal to or less than the broker’s message.max.bytes.

Default: 1000000 (bytes)

metadata

Kafka metadata update settings. The metadata contains information about brokers, topics, partition, and active leaders to use for publishing.

refresh_frequency
Metadata refresh interval. Defaults to 10 minutes.
full
Strategy to use when fetching metadata. When this option is true, the client will maintain a full set of metadata for all the available topics. When set to false it will only refresh the metadata for the configured topics. The default is false.
retry.max
Total number of metadata update retries. The default is 3.
retry.backoff
Waiting time between retries. The default is 250ms.

required_acks

The ACK reliability level required from broker. 0=no response, 1=wait for local commit, -1=wait for all replicas to commit. The default is 1.

Note: If set to 0, no ACKs are returned by Kafka. Messages might be lost silently on error.

Default: 1 (wait for local commit)

timeout

The number of seconds to wait for responses from the Kafka brokers before timing out. The default is 30 (seconds).

Default: 1000000 (bytes)
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