Ansible Role: Filebeat for ELK Stack

An Ansible Role that installs Filebeat on RedHat/CentOS or Debian/Ubuntu.

NOTE: this is to install a secondary filebeat in the event that a 3rd party requires log shipping

Requirements

None.

Role Variables

Available variables are listed below, along with default values (see defaults/main.yml):

filebeat_external_create_config: true

Whether to create the Filebeat configuration file and handle the copying of SSL key and cert for filebeat. If you prefer to create a configuration file yourself you can set this to false.

filebeat_prospectors:
  - input_type: log
    paths:
      - "/var/log/*.log"

Prospectors that will be listed in the prospectors section of the Filebeat configuration. Read through the Filebeat Prospectors configuration guide for more options.

filebeat_output_elasticsearch_enabled: false
filebeat_output_elasticsearch_hosts:
  - "localhost:9200"

Whether to enable Elasticsearch output, and which hosts to send output to.

filebeat_output_logstash_enabled: true
filebeat_output_logstash_hosts:
  - "localhost:5000"

Whether to enable Logstash output, and which hosts to send output to.

filebeat_enable_logging: false 
filebeat_log_level: warning
filebeat_log_dir: /var/log/filebeat
filebeat_log_filename: filebeat.log

Filebeat logging.

filebeat_ssl_dir: /etc/pki/logstash

The path where certificates and keyfiles will be stored.

filebeat_ssl_certificate_file: ""
filebeat_ssl_key_file: ""

Local paths to the SSL certificate and key files, which will be copied into the filebeat_ssl_dir.

For utmost security, you should use your own valid certificate and keyfile, and update the filebeat_ssl_* variables in your playbook to use your certificate.

To generate a self-signed certificate/key pair, you can use use the command:

$ sudo openssl req -x509 -batch -nodes -days 3650 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout filebeat.key -out filebeat.crt

Note that filebeat and logstash may not work correctly with self-signed certificates unless you also have the full chain of trust (including the Certificate Authority for your self-signed cert) added on your server. See: elastic/logstash#4926 (comment)

filebeat_ssl_insecure: "false"

Set this to "true" to allow the use of self-signed certificates (when a CA isn't available).

Dependencies

None.

Example Playbook

- hosts: logs
  roles:
    - geerlingguy.java
    - geerlingguy.elasticsearch
    - geerlingguy.logstash
    - geerlingguy.filebeat

License

MIT / BSD

Author Information

This role was created in 2016 by Jeff Geerling, author of Ansible for DevOps.