Recipe Syslog To Elasticsearch

Looking to get data out of syslog into elasticsearch? You can do that with fluentd in 10 minutes!

Here is how:

$ gem install fluentd
$ gem install fluent-plugin-elasticsearch
$ touch fluentd.conf

fluentd.conf should look like this (just copy and paste this into fluentd.conf):

<source>
  @type syslog
  port 5140
  bind 0.0.0.0
  tag system.local
</source>

<match **>
  @type elasticsearch
  logstash_format true
  host <hostname> #(optional; default="localhost")
  port <port> #(optional; default=9200)
  index_name <index name> #(optional; default=fluentd)
  type_name <type name> #(optional; default=fluentd)
</match>

After that, you can start fluentd and everything should work:

$ fluentd -c fluentd.conf

Of course, this is just a quick example. If you are thinking of running fluentd in production, consider using td-agent, the enterprise version of Fluentd packaged and maintained by Treasure Data, Inc..

If this article is incorrect or outdated, or omits critical information, please let us know. Fluentd is a open source project under Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). All components are available under the Apache 2 License.