This article explains how to install the td-agent rpm package, the stable Fluentd distribution package maintained by Treasure Data, Inc.

What is td-agent?

Fluentd is written in Ruby for flexibility, with performance sensitive parts written in C. However, some users may have difficulty installing and operating a Ruby daemon.

That's why Treasure Data, Inc is providing the stable distribution of Fluentd, called td-agent. The differences between Fluentd and td-agent can be found here.

This installation guide is for td-agent v3, the new stable version. td-agent v3 uses fluentd v1.0 in the core. See this page for the comparison between v2 and v3.

Step 0: Before Installation

Please follow the Preinstallation Guide to configure your OS properly. This will prevent many unnecessary problems.

Step 1: Install from rpm Repository

It's HIGHLY recommended that you set up ntpd on the node to prevent invalid timestamps in your logs. Please check the Preinstallation Guide.

Redhat / CentOS

CentOS and RHEL 6, 7 64bit are currently supported.

Executing install-redhat-td-agent3.sh will automatically install td-agent on your machine. This shell script registers a new rpm repository at /etc/yum.repos.d/td.repo and installs the td-agent rpm package.

$ curl -L https://toolbelt.treasuredata.com/sh/install-redhat-td-agent3.sh | sh

We use $releasever for repository path in the script and $releasever should be only major version like \"7\". If your environment uses other format like \"7.2\", change it to only major version or setup TD repository manually.

Amazon Linux

Mainly for Amazon Linux 2. Recent two 64bit versions are supported for amazon linux 1. This means if latest version is 2018.03, rpm is provided for 2018.03 and 2017.09.

# Amazon Linux 2
$ curl -L https://toolbelt.treasuredata.com/sh/install-amazon2-td-agent3.sh | sh
# Amazon Linux 1
$ curl -L https://toolbelt.treasuredata.com/sh/install-amazon1-td-agent3.sh | sh

Newer td-agent 3 no longer support Amazon Linux 1. If you want to use latest td-agent 3, please upgrade your Amazon Linux 1 to Amazon Linux 2.

We use $releasever for repository path in the script and $releasever should be \"year.month\" format like \"2017.09\". On AWS, some services modify $releasever to own format and it will cause installation failure. If your environment's $releasever is non-\"year.month\" format, change it to \"year.month\" format or setup TD repository manually.

Step 2: Launch Daemon

td-agent provides 2 scripts:

systemd

The /usr/lib/systemd/system/td-agent script is provided to start, stop, or restart the agent.

$ sudo systemctl start td-agent.service
$ sudo systemctl status td-agent.service
● td-agent.service - td-agent: Fluentd based data collector for Treasure Data
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/td-agent.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (running) since Thu 2017-12-07 15:12:27 PST; 6min ago
     Docs: https://docs.treasuredata.com/articles/td-agent
  Process: 53192 ExecStart = /opt/td-agent/embedded/bin/fluentd --log /var/log/td-agent/td-agent.log --daemon /var/run/td-agent/td-agent.pid (code = exited, statu
 Main PID: 53198 (fluentd)
   CGroup: /system.slice/td-agent.service
           ├─53198 /opt/td-agent/embedded/bin/ruby /opt/td-agent/embedded/bin/fluentd --log /var/log/td-agent/td-agent.log --daemon /var/run/td-agent/td-agent
           └─53203 /opt/td-agent/embedded/bin/ruby -Eascii-8bit:ascii-8bit /opt/td-agent/embedded/bin/fluentd --log /var/log/td-agent/td-agent.log --daemon /v
​
Dec 07 15:12:27 ubuntu systemd[1]: Starting td-agent: Fluentd based data collector for Treasure Data...
Dec 07 15:12:27 ubuntu systemd[1]: Started td-agent: Fluentd based data collector for Treasure Data.

If you want to customize systemd behaviour, put your td-agent.service into /etc/systemd/system

init.d

The /etc/init.d/td-agent script is provided to start, stop, or restart the agent.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/td-agent start
Starting td-agent: [  OK  ]
$ sudo /etc/init.d/td-agent status
td-agent (pid  21678) is running...

The following commands are supported:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/td-agent start
$ sudo /etc/init.d/td-agent stop
$ sudo /etc/init.d/td-agent restart
$ sudo /etc/init.d/td-agent status

Please make sure your configuration file is located at /etc/td-agent/td-agent.conf.

Step 3: Post Sample Logs via HTTP

By default, /etc/td-agent/td-agent.conf is configured to take logs from HTTP and route them to stdout (/var/log/td-agent/td-agent.log). You can post sample log records using the curl command.

$ curl -X POST -d 'json={"json":"message"}' http://localhost:8888/debug.test

Next Steps

You're now ready to collect your real logs using Fluentd. Please see the following tutorials to learn how to collect your data from various data sources.

• Basic Configuration

  • ​Config File​

• Application Logs

  • ​Ruby, Java, Python, PHP,

    ​Perl, Node.js, Scala​

• Examples

  • ​Store Apache Log into Amazon S3​

  • ​Store Apache Log into MongoDB​

  • ​Data Collection into HDFS​

Please refer to the resources below for further steps.

• ​ChangeLog of td-agent​

• ​Chef Cookbook​

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.