Send Syslog Data to Sematext
Sematext Dashboard
Elasticsearch is an open source search engine known for its ease of use. Sematext runs and manages Elasticsearch in the cloud. You also have the option to use Kibana alongside the dashboards in the Sematext UI.
By combining Fluentd and Sematext's managed Elasticsearch + Kibana you get a scalable, flexible, easy to use log management tool and search engine with an intuitive native web UI. You also get Kibana, if you want to use it. This provides a managed Splunk alternative, for a fraction of the cost.
In this guide, we'll cover the installation, setup, and basic use of this log management solution. This setup was tested on Ubuntu 18.04. If you're not familiar with Fluentd, please learn more about Fluentd first.
In this guide you'll install
td-agent, the stable release of Fluentd. Please refer to the guides below for detailed installation steps:Next, install the Elasticsearch plugin for Fluentd
fluent-plugin-elasticsearch:$ sudo /usr/sbin/td-agent-gem install fluent-plugin-elasticsearch --no-document
Now you'll configure the
td-agent (Fluentd) to interface properly with Elasticsearch. Please edit /etc/td-agent/td-agent.conf as shown below:# Switch to debug if you need to debug
<system>
log_level debug
</system>
# get logs from syslog
<source>
@type syslog
port 42185
tag syslog
</source>
# get logs from fluent-logger, fluent-cat or other Fluentd instances
<source>
@type forward
</source>
<filter **>
@type stdout
</filter>
<match syslog.**>
@type elasticsearch
host logsene-receiver.sematext.com
# for EU
# host logsene-receiver.eu.sematext.com
port 443
scheme https
index_name <LOGS_TOKEN>
<buffer>
@type file
path /tmp/fluent/es-buffer/es.all.*.buffer
chunk_limit_size 250k
flush_interval 50s
flush_thread_count 1
retry_limit 5
retry_wait 60
</buffer>
</match>
Once everything has been set up and configured, start
td-agent:# init
$ sudo /etc/init.d/td-agent start
# or systemd
$ sudo systemctl start td-agent.service
Finally, configure forwarding logs from your
rsyslogd to Fluentd. Please add the following line to your /etc/rsyslog.conf, and restart rsyslog. This will forward your local syslog to Fluentd, and Fluentd will forward the logs to Sematext:*.* @127.0.0.1:42185
Please restart the
rsyslog service once the modification is complete:$ sudo /etc/init.d/rsyslog restart
Once Fluentd receives logs from
rsyslog and ships them to Sematext, you can view, search and visualize the log data using prebuilt Dashboards, by creating custom Dashboards, or with Kibana.First of all, open up the Seamtext UI and access your App. You'll see prebuilt dashboards with full-text search, filters, and alerts out-of-the-box.
Sematext: Configure Logs
Sematext will automatically figure out hosts, idents, pids, timestamps, and the origin of the logs. In this case the origin is Fluentd.
After you start receiving logs, you can create custom charts, reports, and alerts to fine-tune your own personal use-case.
If you are used to Kibana, you can still use it as well. For more details, read Kibana's official manual.
Sematext: Logs Overview
To manually send logs to Sematext, please use the
logger command:$ logger -t test foobar
When debugging your
td-agent configuration, using filter_stdout will be useful. All the logs including errors can be found at /etc/td-agent/td-agent.log.<filter **>
@type stdout
</filter>
<match **>
@type elasticsearch
host logsene-receiver.sematext.com
# for EU
# host logsene-receiver.eu.sematext.com
port 443
scheme https
index_name <LOGS_TOKEN>
<buffer>
flush_interval 5s # for testing
</buffer>
</match>
This how-to guide introduced an alternative SaaS tool to use instead of Splunk. The combination of Fluentd and Sematext, with an open Elasticsearch API and Kibana, gives you tooling you are used to, with the added benefit of not having to manage an Elasticsearch cluster.
You'll get access to storing and searching logs from infrastructure, apps, and software. The example provided in this article has been tested for the current production environments of Sematext.
If this article is incorrect or outdated, or omits critical information, please let us know. Fluentd is an open-source project under Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). All components are available under the Apache 2 License.
Last modified 2yr ago