Welcome, dear reader! This is the last part of our series about the ELK stack, that provides a centralized architecture for gathering and analyse of application logs. On this last part, we will see how we can construct a rich front-end for our logging solution, using Kibana.

Kibana

Also developed by Elasticsearch, Kibana provides a way to explore the data and/or build rich dashboards of our data on the indexer. With a simple configuration, that consist of pointing Kibana to a ElasticSearch’s index – it also allows to point to multiple indexes at once, using a wildcard configuration -, it allow us to quickly set up a front-end for our stack.

So, without further delay, let’s begin our last step on the setup of our solution.

Hands-on

Installation

Beginning our lab, let’s download Kibana from the site. To do this, let’s open a terminal and type the following command:

curl https://download.elasticsearch.org/kibana/kibana/kibana-4.0.0-linux-x64.tar.gz | tar -zx

PS: this lab assumes the reader is using a linux 64-bit OS (I am using Ubuntu 14.10). If the reader is using another type of OS, the download page for Kibana is the following:

http://www.elasticsearch.org/overview/kibana/installation/

After running the command, we can see a folder called “kibana-4.0.0-linux-x64”. That’s all we need to do to install Kibana on our lab. Before we start running, however, we need to start both Logstash and ElasticSearch, to make our whole stack go live. If the reader didn’t have the stack set up, please refer to part 1 and part 2.

One configuration that the reader may take note is the elasticsearch_url property, inside the “kibana.yml” file, on the config folder. Since we didn’t change the default port from our elasticsearch’s cluster and we are running all the tools on the same machine, there is no need to change anything, but on a real world scenario, you may need to change this property to point to your elasticsearch’s cluster. The reader can made other configurations as well on this file, such as configuring a SSL connection between Kibana and Elasticsearch or configure the name of the index Kibana will use to store his metadata on elasticsearch.

After we start the rest of the stack, it is time to run Kibana.To run it, we navigate to the bin folder of Kibana’s installation folder, and type:

 ./kibana

After some seconds, we can see that Kibana has successfully booted:

Set up

Now, let’s start using Kibana. Let’s open a web browser and enter:

http://localhost:5601/

On our first run, we will be greeted with the following screen:

The reason because we are seeing this screen is because we dont have any index configured. It is on this screen that we can, for example, point to multiple indexes. If we think, for example, about the default naming pattern of logstash’s plugin, we can see that, for each new date we run, logstash will demand the creation of a new index with the pattern “logstash-%{+YYYY.MM.dd}”. So, if we want Kibana to use all the indexes created this way on a single dataset, we simply configure the field with the value “logstash-*”

On our case, we change the default naming of the index, to demonstrate the possible configurations of the tool, so we change the field to “log4jlogs”. One important thing to note on logstash’s plugin documentation, is that the idea behind the index pattern is to make more easy to do operations such as deleting old data, so in a real world scenario, it would be more wise to leave the default pattern enabled.

The other field we need to set is the Time-field name . This field is used by Kibana as a primary filter, allowing him to filter the data from the dashboards and data explorations on a timeline perspective. If we see our document type from the documents storing log information on elasticsearch, we can see it has a field called @timestamp. This field is perfectly fit to our time-field need, so we put “@timestamp” in the field.

After we click on the “create” button, we will be sent to a new page, where we can see all the fields from the index we pointed, proving that our configuration was a success:

Of course, there is other settings as well that we can configure, such as the precision on the numeric fields or the date mask when showing this kind of data on the interface, all available on the “advanced” menu. For our lab needs, however, the default options will suffice, so we leave this page by clicking on the “Discover” menu.

Discovering the data

When we enter the new page, if we didnt send any data to the cluster in the last 15 minutes, we will see a message of no data found (see bellow). The reason for this is because, by default, Kibana limits the results for the last 15 minutes only. To change this, we can either change the time limit by clicking on the value on the upper right corner of the page, or by running again the java program from the previous post, so we have more fresh data.

After we set some data to explore, we can see that the page changes to a data view, where we can dinamically change field filters, by changing the left menu, and drill down the data to the fields level, as we can see bellow. The reader can feel free to explore the page before we move on to our next part.

Dashboards

Now that we have all set, let’s begin by creating a simple dashboard. we will create a pie chart of the messages by the log level, a table view showing the count of messages by class and a line chart of the error messages across the time.

First, let’s begin with the pie chart. We will select, from the menu, “Visualize” , then follow this sequence of options on the next pages:

pie chart >> from a new search

We will enter a page like the one bellow:

In this page, we will make our log level pie chart. To do this, we leave the metrics area unchanged, with the “count” value as slice size. Then, we choose “split slices” on the buckets area and select a “terms” aggregation, by the field “priority”. The screen bellow show our pie chart born!

After we made our chart, before we leave this page, we click on the disk icon on the top menu, input a name for our chart – also called visualization by Kibana’s terminology – and save it, for later use.

Now it is time for our table view. From the same menu we used to save our pie chart, click on the most left icon, called “new visualization”, then select “data table” and “from a new search”. We will see a similar page from the pie chart one, with similar options of aggregations and metrics to configure. With the intent of not bothering the reader with much repetitive instructions, from now on I will keep the explanation the more graphical possible, by the screenshots.

So, our data table view is made by making the configurations we can see on the left menu:

Analogous with what we made on the previous visualization, let’s also save the table view and click on new visualization, selecting line chart this time. The configuration for this chart can be seen bellow:

That concludes our visualizations. Now, let’s conclude our lab by making a dashboard that will show all the visualizations we build on the same page. To do this, first we select the “dashboard” option on the top menu. We will be greeted with the screen bellow:

This is the dashboard page, where we can create, edit and load dashboards. To add visualizations, we simply click on the plus icon on the top right side and select the visualization we want to add, like we can see bellow:

After we add the visualizations, it is pretty simple to arrange them: all we have to do is to drag and drop the visualizations as we like. My final arrangement of the dashboard is bellow, but the reader can arrange the way he finds best:

Finally, to save the dashboard, we simply click on the disk icon and input a name for our dashboard.

Cons

Of course, we cant make a complete overview of a tool, if we dont mention any noticeable con of it. The most visible downside of Kibana, on my opinion, is the lack of a native support to authentication and authorization. The reader may notice, by our tour of the interface, that there is no user or permission CRUDs whatsoever. Indeed, Kibana doesnt come with this feature.

One common workaround for this is to configure basic authentication on the web server Kibana runs with it – if we were using Kibana 3 on our lab, we would have to install manually a web server and deploy Kibana on it. On Kibana 4, we dont have to do this, because Kibana comes with a embedded node.js – , so the authentication is made by URL patterns. This link to the official node.js documentation provides a path to set basic authentication on the embedded server Kibana comes with it. The file that starts the server and need to be edited is on /src/bin/kibana.js.

Very recently, Elasticsearch has released shield, a plugin that implements a versatile security layer on Elasticsearch and subsequently on Kibana. Evidently, is a much more elegant and complete solution then the previous one, but the reader has to keep it in mind that he has to acquire a license to use shield.

Conclusion

And that concludes our tour by the ELK stack. Of course, on a real world scenario, we have some more steps to do, like the aforementioned authentication configuration, the configuration of purge policies and so on.However, we still can see that the core features we need were implemented, with very little effort. Like we talked about on the beginning of our series, logging information is a very rich source of information, that it has to be better explored on the business world. Thanks to everyone that follows my blog, until next time.

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Welcome, dear reader, to another post from my blog. On this new series, we will talk about a architecture specially designed to process data from log files coming from applications, with the junction of 3 tools, Logstash, ElasticSearch and Kibana. But after all, do we really need such a structure to process log files?

Stacks of log

On a company ecosystem, there is lots of systems, like the CRM, ERP, etc. On such environments, it is common for the systems to produce tons of logs, which provide not only a real-time analysis of the technical status of the software, but could also provide some business information too, like a log of a customer’s behavior  on a  shopping cart, for example. To dive into this useful source of information, enters the ELK architecture, which name came from the initials of the software involved: ElasticSearch, LogStash and Kibana. The picture below shows in a macro vision the flow between the tools:

As we can see, there’s a clear separation of concerns between the tools, where which one has his own individual part on the processing of the log data:

• Logstash: Responsible for collect the data, make transformations like parsing – using regular expressions – adding fields, formatting as structures like JSON, etc and finally sending the data to various destinations, like a ElasticSearch cluster. Later on this post we will see more detail about this useful tool;
•  ElasticSearch: RESTful data indexer, ElasticSearch provides a clustered solution to make searches and analysis on a set of data. On the second part of our series, we will see more about this tool;
• Kibana: Web-based application, responsible for providing a light and easy-to-use dashboard tool. On the third and last part of our series, we will see more of this tool;

So, to begin our road in the ELK stack, let’s begin by talking about the tool responsible for integrating our data: LogStash.

LogStash installation

To install, all we need to do is unzip the file we get from LogStash’s site and run the binaries on the bin folder. The only pre-requisite for the tool is to have Java installed and configured in the environment. If the reader wants to follow my instructions with the same system then me, I am using Ubuntu 14.10 with Java 8, which can be downloaded from Oracle’s site here.

With Java installed and configured, we begin by downloading and unziping the file. To do this, we open a terminal and input:

curl https://download.elasticsearch.org/logstash/logstash/logstash-1.4.2.tar.gz | tar xz

After the download, we will have LogStash on a folder on the same place we run our ‘curl’ command. On the LogStash terminology, we have 4 types of configurations we can make for a stream, named:

• input: On this configuration, we put the sources of our streams, that can range from polling files of a file system to more complex inputs such as a Amazon SQS queue and even Twitter;
• codec: On this configuration we make transformations on the data, like turning into a JSON structure, or grouping together lines that are semantically related, like for example, a Java’s stack trace;
• filter: On this configuration we make operations such as parsing data from/to different formats, removal of special characters and checksums for deduplication;
• output: On this configuration we define the destinations for the processed data, such as a ElasticSearch cluster, AWS SQS, Nagios etc;

Now that we have established LogStash’s configuration structure, let’s begin with our first execution. In LogStash we have two ways to configure our execution, one way by providing the settings on the start command itself and the other one is by providing a configuration file for the command. The simplest way to boot a LogStash’s stream is by setting the input and output as the console itself, to make this execution, we open a terminal, navigate to the bin folder of our LogStash’s installation and execute the following command:

./logstash -e ‘input { stdin { } } output { stdout {} }’

As we can see after we run the command, we booted LogStash, setting the console as the input and the output, without any transformation or filtering. To test, we simply input anything on the console, seeing that our message is displayed back by the tool:

Now that we get the installation out of the way, let’s begin with the actual lab. Unfortunately -or not, depending on the point of view -, it would take us a lot of time to show all the features of what we can do with the tool, so to make a short but illustrative example, we will start 2 logstash streams, to do the following:

1st stream:

• The input will be made by a java program, which will produce a log file with log4j, representing technical information;
• For now, we will just print logstash’s events on the console, using the rubydebug codec. On our next part on the series, we will return to this configuration and change the output to send the events to elasticsearch;

2nd stream:

• The input will be made by the same java program, which will produce a positional file, representing business information of costumers and orders;
• We will then use the grok filter to parse the data of the positional file into separated fields, producing the data for the output step;
• Finally, we use the mongodb output, to save our data – filtering to only persist the orders – on a  Mongodb collection;

With the streams defined, we can begin our coding. First, let’s create the java program which will generate the inputs for the streams. The code for the program can be seen bellow:

package com.technology.alexandreesl;

import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.PrintWriter;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.List;

import org.apache.log4j.Logger;

public class LogStashProvider {

private static Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(LogStashProvider.class);

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

try {

logger.info(“STARTING DATA COLLECTION”);

List<String> data = new ArrayList<String>();

Customer customer = new Customer();
customer.setName(“Alexandre”);
customer.setAge(32);
customer.setSex(‘M’);
customer.setIdentification(“4434554567”);

List<Order> orders = new ArrayList<Order>();

for (int counter = 1; counter < 10; counter++) {

Order order = new Order();

order.setOrderId(counter);
order.setProductId(counter);
order.setCustomerId(customer.getIdentification());
order.setQuantity(counter);

orders.add(order);

}

logger.info(“FETCHING RESULTS INTO DESTINATION”);

PrintWriter file = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(
“/home/alexandreesl/logstashdataexample/data”
+ new Date().getTime() + “.txt”));

file.println(“1” + customer.getName() + customer.getSex()
+ customer.getAge() + customer.getIdentification());

for (Order order : orders) {
file.println(“2” + order.getOrderId() + order.getCustomerId()
+ order.getProductId() + order.getQuantity());
}

logger.info(“CLEANING UP!”);

file.flush();
file.close();

// forcing a error to simulate stack traces
PrintWriter fileError = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(
“/etc/nopermission.txt”));

} catch (Exception e) {

logger.error(“ERROR!”, e);
}

}

}

As we can see, it is a very simple class, that uses log4j to generate some log and output a positional file representing data from customers and orders and at the end, try to create a file on a folder we don’t have permission to write by default, “forcing” a error to produce a stack trace. The complete code for the program can be found here. Now that we have made our data generator, let’s begin the configuration for logstash. The configuration for our first example is the following:

input {
log4j {
port => 1500
type => “log4j”
tags => [ “technical”, “log”]
}
}

output {
stdout { codec => rubydebug }
}

To run the script, let’s create a file called “config1.conf” and save the file with the script on the “bin” folder of logstash’s installation folder. Finally, we run the script with the following command:

 ./logstash -f config1.conf

This will start logstash process with the configurations we provided. To test, simply run the java program we coded earlier and we will see a sequence of message events in logstash’s console window, generated by the rubydebug codec, like the one bellow, for example:

{
“message” => “ERROR!”,
“@version” => “1”,
“@timestamp” => “2015-01-24T19:08:10.872Z”,
“type” => “log4j”,
“tags” => [
[0] “technical”,
[1] “log”
],
“host” => “127.0.0.1:34412”,
“path” => “com.technology.alexandreesl.LogStashProvider”,
“priority” => “ERROR”,
“logger_name” => “com.technology.alexandreesl.LogStashProvider”,
“thread” => “main”,
“class” => “com.technology.alexandreesl.LogStashProvider”,
“file” => “LogStashProvider.java:70”,
“method” => “main”,
“stack_trace” => “java.io.FileNotFoundException: /etc/nopermission.txt (Permission denied)\n\tat java.io.FileOutputStream.open(Native Method)\n\tat java.io.FileOutputStream.<init>(FileOutputStream.java:213)\n\tat java.io.FileOutputStream.<init>(FileOutputStream.java:101)\n\tat java.io.FileWriter.<init>(FileWriter.java:63)\n\tat com.technology.alexandreesl.LogStashProvider.main(LogStashProvider.java:66)”
}

Now, let’s move on to the next stream. First, we create another file, called “config2.conf”, on the same folder we created the first one. On this new file, we create the following configuration:

input {
file {
path => “/home/alexandreesl/logstashdataexample/data*.txt”
start_position => “beginning”
}
}

filter {
grok {
match => [ “message” , “(?<file_type>.{1})(?<name>.{9})(?<sex>.{1})(?<age>.{2})(?<identification>.{10})” , “message” , “(?<file_type>.{1})(?<order_id>.{1})(?<costumer_id>.{10})(?<product_id>.{1})(?<quantity>.{1})” ]
}
}

output {
stdout { codec => rubydebug }
if [file_type] == “2” {
mongodb {
collection => “testData”
database => “mydb”
uri => “mongodb://localhost”
}
}
}

With the configuration created, we can run our second example. Before we do that, however, let’s dive a little on the configuration we just made. First, we used the file input, which will make logstash keep monitoring the files on the folder and processing them as they appear on the input folder.

Next, we create a filter with the grok plugin. This filter uses combinations of regular expressions, that parses the data from the input. The plugin comes with more then 100 patterns pre-made that helps the development. Another useful tool in the use of grok is a site where we could test our expressions before use. Both links are available on the links section at the end of this post.

Finally, we use the mongodb plugin, where we reference our logstash for a database and collection of a mongodb instance, where we will insert the data from the file into mongodb’s documents. We also used again the rubydebug codec, so we can also see the processing of the files on the console. The reader will note that we used a “if” statement before the configuration of the mongodb output. After we parse the data with grok, we can use the newly created fields to do some logic on our stream. In this case, we filter to only process data with the type “2”, so only the order’s data goes to the collection on mongodb, instead of all the data. We could have expanded more on this example, like saving the data into two different collections, but for the idea of passing a general view of the structure of logstash for the reader, the present logic will suffice.

PS: This example assumes the reader has mongodb installed and running on the default port of his environment, with a db “mydb” and a collection “testData” created. If the reader doesn’t have mongodb, the instructions can be found on the official documentation.

Finally, with everything installed and configured, we run the script, with the following command:

./logstash -f config2.conf

After logstash’s start, if we run our program to generate a file, we will see logstash working the data, like the screen bellow:

And finally, if we query the collection on mongodb, we see the data is persisted:

Conclusion

And so we conclude the first part of our series. With a simple usage, logstash prove to be a useful tool in the integration of information from different formats and sources, specially log-related. In the next part of our series, we will dive in the next tool of our stack: ElasticSearch. Until next time

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