Multiline codec plugin
editMultiline codec plugin
edit- Plugin version: v3.0.11
- Released on: 2021-06-23
- Changelog
For other versions, see the Versioned plugin docs.
Installation
editFor plugins not bundled by default, it is easy to install by running bin/logstash-plugin install logstash-codec-multiline. See Working with plugins for more details.
Getting Help
editFor questions about the plugin, open a topic in the Discuss forums. For bugs or feature requests, open an issue in Github. For the list of Elastic supported plugins, please consult the Elastic Support Matrix.
Description
editThe multiline codec will collapse multiline messages and merge them into a single event.
If you are using a Logstash input plugin that supports multiple hosts, such as the beats input plugin, you should not use the multiline codec to handle multiline events. Doing so may result in the mixing of streams and corrupted event data. In this situation, you need to handle multiline events before sending the event data to Logstash.
The original goal of this codec was to allow joining of multiline messages from files into a single event. For example, joining Java exception and stacktrace messages into a single event.
The config looks like this:
input {
stdin {
codec => multiline {
pattern => "pattern, a regexp"
negate => "true" or "false"
what => "previous" or "next"
}
}
}
The pattern should match what you believe to be an indicator that the field
is part of a multi-line event.
The what must be previous or next and indicates the relation
to the multi-line event.
The negate can be true or false (defaults to false). If true, a
message not matching the pattern will constitute a match of the multiline
filter and the what will be applied. (vice-versa is also true)
For example, Java stack traces are multiline and usually have the message starting at the far-left, with each subsequent line indented. Do this:
input {
stdin {
codec => multiline {
pattern => "^\s"
what => "previous"
}
}
}
This says that any line starting with whitespace belongs to the previous line.
Another example is to merge lines not starting with a date up to the previous line..
input {
file {
path => "/var/log/someapp.log"
codec => multiline {
# Grok pattern names are valid! :)
pattern => "^%{TIMESTAMP_ISO8601} "
negate => true
what => "previous"
}
}
}
This says that any line not starting with a timestamp should be merged with the previous line.
One more common example is C line continuations (backslash). Here’s how to do that:
input {
stdin {
codec => multiline {
pattern => "\\$"
what => "next"
}
}
}
This says that any line ending with a backslash should be combined with the following line.
Multiline Codec Configuration Options
edit| Setting | Input type | Required |
|---|---|---|
No |
||
string, one of |
No |
|
No |
||
No |
||
No |
||
No |
||
Yes |
||
No |
||
string, one of |
Yes |
auto_flush_interval
edit- Value type is number
- There is no default value for this setting.
The accumulation of multiple lines will be converted to an event when either a matching new line is seen or there has been no new data appended for this many seconds. No default. If unset, no auto_flush. Units: seconds
charset
edit-
Value can be any of:
ASCII-8BIT,UTF-8,US-ASCII,Big5,Big5-HKSCS,Big5-UAO,CP949,Emacs-Mule,EUC-JP,EUC-KR,EUC-TW,GB2312,GB18030,GBK,ISO-8859-1,ISO-8859-2,ISO-8859-3,ISO-8859-4,ISO-8859-5,ISO-8859-6,ISO-8859-7,ISO-8859-8,ISO-8859-9,ISO-8859-10,ISO-8859-11,ISO-8859-13,ISO-8859-14,ISO-8859-15,ISO-8859-16,KOI8-R,KOI8-U,Shift_JIS,UTF-16BE,UTF-16LE,UTF-32BE,UTF-32LE,Windows-31J,Windows-1250,Windows-1251,Windows-1252,IBM437,IBM737,IBM775,CP850,IBM852,CP852,IBM855,CP855,IBM857,IBM860,IBM861,IBM862,IBM863,IBM864,IBM865,IBM866,IBM869,Windows-1258,GB1988,macCentEuro,macCroatian,macCyrillic,macGreek,macIceland,macRoman,macRomania,macThai,macTurkish,macUkraine,CP950,CP951,IBM037,stateless-ISO-2022-JP,eucJP-ms,CP51932,EUC-JIS-2004,GB12345,ISO-2022-JP,ISO-2022-JP-2,CP50220,CP50221,Windows-1256,Windows-1253,Windows-1255,Windows-1254,TIS-620,Windows-874,Windows-1257,MacJapanese,UTF-7,UTF8-MAC,UTF-16,UTF-32,UTF8-DoCoMo,SJIS-DoCoMo,UTF8-KDDI,SJIS-KDDI,ISO-2022-JP-KDDI,stateless-ISO-2022-JP-KDDI,UTF8-SoftBank,SJIS-SoftBank,BINARY,CP437,CP737,CP775,IBM850,CP857,CP860,CP861,CP862,CP863,CP864,CP865,CP866,CP869,CP1258,Big5-HKSCS:2008,ebcdic-cp-us,eucJP,euc-jp-ms,EUC-JISX0213,eucKR,eucTW,EUC-CN,eucCN,CP936,ISO2022-JP,ISO2022-JP2,ISO8859-1,ISO8859-2,ISO8859-3,ISO8859-4,ISO8859-5,ISO8859-6,CP1256,ISO8859-7,CP1253,ISO8859-8,CP1255,ISO8859-9,CP1254,ISO8859-10,ISO8859-11,CP874,ISO8859-13,CP1257,ISO8859-14,ISO8859-15,ISO8859-16,CP878,MacJapan,ASCII,ANSI_X3.4-1968,646,CP65000,CP65001,UTF-8-MAC,UTF-8-HFS,UCS-2BE,UCS-4BE,UCS-4LE,CP932,csWindows31J,SJIS,PCK,CP1250,CP1251,CP1252,external,locale -
Default value is
"UTF-8"
The character encoding used in this input. Examples include UTF-8
and cp1252
This setting is useful if your log files are in Latin-1 (aka cp1252)
or in another character set other than UTF-8.
This only affects "plain" format logs since JSON is UTF-8 already.
max_bytes
edit- Value type is bytes
-
Default value is
"10 MiB"
The accumulation of events can make logstash exit with an out of memory error if event boundaries are not correctly defined. This settings make sure to flush multiline events after reaching a number of bytes, it is used in combination max_lines.
max_lines
edit- Value type is number
-
Default value is
500
The accumulation of events can make logstash exit with an out of memory error if event boundaries are not correctly defined. This settings make sure to flush multiline events after reaching a number of lines, it is used in combination max_bytes.
multiline_tag
edit- Value type is string
-
Default value is
"multiline"
Tag multiline events with a given tag. This tag will only be added to events that actually have multiple lines in them.
pattern
edit- This is a required setting.
- Value type is string
- There is no default value for this setting.
The regular expression to match.
patterns_dir
edit- Value type is array
-
Default value is
[]
Logstash ships by default with a bunch of patterns, so you don’t necessarily need to define this yourself unless you are adding additional patterns.
Pattern files are plain text with format:
NAME PATTERN
For example:
NUMBER \d+
what
edit- This is a required setting.
-
Value can be any of:
previous,next - There is no default value for this setting.
If the pattern matched, does event belong to the next or previous event?