Filter Plugins

Fluentd has 6 types of plugins: Input, Parser, Filter, Output, Formatter and Buffer. This article gives an overview of Filter Plugin.

Overview

Filter plugins enables Fluentd to modify event streams. Example use cases are:

1. Filtering out events by grepping the value of one or more fields.

2. Enriching events by adding new fields.

3. Deleting or masking certain fields for privacy and compliance.

How to Use

It is used with the <filter> directive as follows:

<filter foo.bar>
  @type grep
  regexp1 message cool
</filter>

The above directive matches events with the tag "foo.bar", and if the "message" field's value contains "cool", the events go through the rest of the configuration.

Like the <match> directive for output plugins, <filter> matches against a tag. Once the event is processed by the filter, the event proceeds through the configuration top-down. Hence, if there are multiple filters for the same tag, they are applied in descending order. Hence, in the following example,

<filter foo.bar>
  @type grep
  regexp1 message cool
</filter>

<filter foo.bar>
  @type record_transformer
  <record>
    hostname "#{Socket.gethostname}"
  </record>
</filter>

Only the events whose "message" field contain "cool" get the new field "hostname" with the machine's hostname as its value.

Users can create their own custom plugins with a bit of Ruby. See this section for more information.

List of Filter Plugins

• grep
• record-transformer
• filter_stdout

If this article is incorrect or outdated, or omits critical information, please let us know.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.