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Configure inputs

Serverless

Elastic Cloud Serverless projects are autoscaled environments, fully managed by Elastic and available on Elastic Cloud.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

Serverless interfaces and procedures might differ from classic Elastic Stack deployments.

Stack

The Elastic Stack includes Elastic's core products such as Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats.

Availability

  • Generally available

    This functionality is generally available and ready for production usage.

Unless stated otherwise on the page, this functionality is available when your Elastic Stack is deployed on Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Enterprise, Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes, and self-managed environments.

This documentation corresponds to the latest patch available for each minor version. If you're not using the latest patch, check the release notes for changes.

Tip

Filebeat modules provide the fastest getting started experience for common log formats. See Quick start: installation and configuration to learn how to get started.

To configure Filebeat manually (instead of using modules), you specify a list of inputs in the filebeat.inputs section of the filebeat.yml. Inputs specify how Filebeat locates and processes input data.

The list is a YAML array, so each input begins with a dash (-). You can specify multiple inputs, and you can specify the same input type more than once. For example:

YAML 
filebeat.inputs:
- type: filestream
  id: my-filestream-id
  paths:
    - /var/log/system.log
    - /var/log/wifi.log
- type: filestream
  id: apache-filestream-id
  paths:
    - "/var/log/apache2/*"
  fields:
    apache: true
  fields_under_root: true
  1. Each filestream input must have a unique ID to allow tracking the state of files.

For the most basic configuration, define a single input with a single path. For example:

YAML 
filebeat.inputs:
- type: filestream
  id: my-filestream-id
  paths:
    - /var/log/*.log

The input in this example harvests all files in the path /var/log/*.log, which means that Filebeat will harvest all files in the directory /var/log/ that end with .log. All patterns supported by Go Glob are also supported here.

To fetch all files from a predefined level of subdirectories, use this pattern: /var/log/*/*.log. This fetches all .log files from the subfolders of /var/log. It does not fetch log files from the /var/log folder itself. Currently it is not possible to recursively fetch all files in all subdirectories of a directory.

You can configure Filebeat to use the following inputs: