by Jurgens du Toit | Dec 4, 2015 | Logstash
We’ve previously released the Logstash CloudWatch Input plugin to fetch CloudWatch metrics from AWS. Since then we’ve realized that it’s not as complete or as configurable as we’d like it to be. So we’ve refactored it significantly,...
by Jurgens du Toit | Jul 28, 2015 | Logstash
One of the killer features of Logstash is it’s extensibility: You can use various official and unofficial plugins to add the functionality you need to Logstash. Further to that, if you can’t find an existing plugin, it’s relatively simple to write...
by Jurgens du Toit | Jun 17, 2015 | Logstash
UPDATE: We’ve released a significantly updated version of this input. See this post for more details. Amazon’s CloudWatch service provides statistics on various metrics for AWS services. You can track CPU Utilization and credit usage on EC2, the amount of...
by Jurgens du Toit | May 12, 2015 | Logstash
This short guide will look at the Logstash Metrics filter. It often happens that you’re not interested in actual events, but just the number of times an event occurs in a specific period of time. Logstash supports counting events and measuring their velocity...
by Jurgens du Toit | May 5, 2015 | Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash
One of the things I love about DigitalOcean is their applications. You can spin up a droplet to run a number of popular stacks. From LAMP, Redmine and Ghost, to Docker, Django and WordPress. My favourite, of course, is the ELK stack application. It’s a Ubuntu...
by Jurgens du Toit | Apr 28, 2015 | Logstash
Even though Logstash is great for parsing events as they happen, you can also use it to process historical data. Normally logstash will timestamp an event with the time when the event was initially processed. This isn’t ideal when you’re trying to analyze...
by Jurgens du Toit | Apr 15, 2015 | Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch doesn’t come with any type of security out of the box. It’s so open and accessible, anyone can destroy all of your data with a single call. Yes, there is protection against the DELETE call, but it is possible. Recently Elastic released the...
by Jurgens du Toit | Apr 1, 2015 | Logstash
This short guide will look at the HTTP output for Logstash. HTTP is ubiquitous on the Internet. So much so that most people don’t even know they use it every day. Most API’s out there use HTTP. Logstash provides both an HTTP input and output, enabling you...
by Jurgens du Toit | Mar 20, 2015 | Logstash
This short guide will look at the TCP input for Logstash. TCP is a stream protocol with which data can be sent over a network. It forms part of the TCP/IP protocol suite that forms the core of network communication on the internet. This input will allow you to set...
by Jurgens du Toit | Mar 5, 2015 | Logstash
This short guide will look at the syslogd input for Logstash. Syslogd is a standard that defines parameters around logging and a protocol to send logs to a remote server. It’s very useful if you want to separate log generation and storage, and allows you to...