Using a custom ingest pipeline with the Kubernetes Integration

This tutorial explains how to add a custom ingest pipeline to a Kubernetes Integration in order to add specific metadata fields for deployments and cronjobs of pods.

Custom pipelines can be used to add custom data processing, like adding fields, obfuscating sensitive information, and more.

The Kubernetes Integration is used to collect logs and metrics from Kubernetes clusters with Elastic Agent. During the collection, the integration enhances the collected information with extra useful information that users can correlate with different Kubernetes assets. This additional information added on top of collected data, such as labels, annotations, ancestor names of Kubernetes assets, and others, are called metadata.

The Kubernetes Provider offers the add_resource_metadata option to configure the metadata enrichment options.

For Elastic Agent versions >[8.10.4], the default configuration for metadata enrichment is add_resource_metadata.deployment=false and add_resource_metadata.cronjob=false. This means that pods that are created from replicasets that belong to specific deployments would not be enriched with kubernetes.deployment.name. Additionally, pods that are created from jobs that belong to specific cronjobs, would not be enriched with kubernetes.cronjob.name.

Kubernetes Integration Policy > Collect Kubernetes metrics from Kube-state-metrics > Kubernetes Pod Metrics

Example: Enabling the enrichment through add_resource_metadata in a Managed Elastic Agent Policy.

As an alternative to keeping the feature enabled and using more memory resources for Elastic Agent, users can make use of ingest pipelines to add the missing fields of kubernetes.deployment.name and kubernetes.cronjob.name.

Navigate to state_pod data stream under: Kubernetes Integration Policy > Collect Kubernetes metrics from Kube-state-metrics > Kubernetes Pod Metrics.

Create the following custom ingest pipeline with two processors:

The final metrics-kubernetes.state_pod@custom ingest pipeline:

[
  {
    "gsub": {
      "field": "kubernetes.replicaset.name",
      "pattern": "(?:.(?!-))+$",
      "replacement": "",
      "target_field": "kubernetes.deployment.name",
      "ignore_missing": true,
      "ignore_failure": true
    }
  },
  {
    "gsub": {
      "field": "kubernetes.job.name",
      "pattern": "(?:.(?!-))+$",
      "replacement": "",
      "target_field": "kubernetes.cronjob.name",
      "ignore_missing": true,
      "ignore_failure": true
    }
  }
]