Graylog Docker Image

What is Graylog?

Graylog is a centralized logging solution that allows the user to aggregate and search through logs. It provides a powerful query language, a processing pipeline for data transformation, alerting abilities and much more. It is fully extensible through a REST API. Add-Ons can be downloaded from the Graylog Marketplace.

Architecture

Take a look at the minimal Graylog architecture to get the big picture of a Graylog setup. In essence, Graylog needs to talk to MongoDB to store configuration data as well as Elasticsearch to store the actual log data.

How to use this image

Start the MongoDB container

$ docker run --name some-mongo -d mongo:2

Start Elasticsearch

$ docker run --name some-elasticsearch -d elasticsearch:2 elasticsearch -Des.cluster.name="graylog"

Run Graylog server and link with the other two

$ docker run --link some-mongo:mongo --link some-elasticsearch:elasticsearch -p 9000:9000 -e GRAYLOG_WEB_ENDPOINT_URI="http://127.0.0.1:9000/api" -d graylog2/server

Settings

Graylog comes with a default configuration that works out of the box but you have to set a password for the admin user. Also the web interface needs to know how to connect from your browser to the Graylog API. Both can be done via environment variables.

  -e GRAYLOG_PASSWORD_SECRET=somepasswordpepper
  -e GRAYLOG_ROOT_PASSWORD_SHA2=8c6976e5b5410415bde908bd4dee15dfb167a9c873fc4bb8a81f6f2ab448a918
  -e GRAYLOG_WEB_ENDPOINT_URI="http://127.0.0.1:9000/api"

In this case you can login to Graylog with the user and password admin. Generate your own password with this command:

  $ echo -n yourpassword | shasum -a 256

This all can be put in a docker-compose file, like:

version: '2'
services:
  some-mongo:
    image: "mongo:3"
  some-elasticsearch:
    image: "elasticsearch:2"
    command: "elasticsearch -Des.cluster.name='graylog'"
  graylog:
    image: graylog2/server:2.1.1-1
    environment:
      GRAYLOG_PASSWORD_SECRET: somepasswordpepper
      GRAYLOG_ROOT_PASSWORD_SHA2: 8c6976e5b5410415bde908bd4dee15dfb167a9c873fc4bb8a81f6f2ab448a918
      GRAYLOG_WEB_ENDPOINT_URI: http://127.0.0.1:9000/api
    links:
      - some-mongo:mongo
      - some-elasticsearch:elasticsearch
    ports:
      - "9000:9000"

After starting the three containers with docker-compose up open your browser with the URL http://127.0.0.1:9000 and login with admin:admin

Persist log data

In order to make the log data and configuration of Graylog persistent, you can use external volumes to store all data. In case of a container restart simply re-use the existing data from the former instances.

If you need to customize the configuration files for Graylog (such as the Log4j 2 configuration), you can download the vanilla files from GitHub and put them into a dedicated Docker volume.

Create the configuration directory and copy the default files:

mkdir /graylog/config
cd /graylog/config
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Graylog2/graylog2-images/2.1/docker/config/graylog.conf
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Graylog2/graylog2-images/2.1/docker/config/log4j2.xml

The docker-compose.yml file looks like this:

version: '2'
services:
  some-mongo:
    image: "mongo:3"
    volumes:
      - /graylog/data/mongo:/data/db
  some-elasticsearch:
    image: "elasticsearch:2"
    command: "elasticsearch -Des.cluster.name='graylog'"
    volumes:
      - /graylog/data/elasticsearch:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
  graylog:
    image: graylog2/server:2.1.1-1
    volumes:
      - /graylog/data/journal:/usr/share/graylog/data/journal
      - /graylog/config:/usr/share/graylog/data/config
    environment:
      GRAYLOG_PASSWORD_SECRET: somepasswordpepper
      GRAYLOG_ROOT_PASSWORD_SHA2: 8c6976e5b5410415bde908bd4dee15dfb167a9c873fc4bb8a81f6f2ab448a918
      GRAYLOG_WEB_ENDPOINT_URI: http://127.0.0.1:9000/api
    links:
      - some-mongo:mongo
      - some-elasticsearch:elasticsearch
    ports:
      - "9000:9000"
      - "12201/udp:12201/udp"
      - "1514/udp:1514/udp"

Start all services with:

docker-compose up

Configuration

Every configuration option can be set via environment variables, take a look here for an overview. Simply prefix the parameter name with GRAYLOG_ and put it all in upper case. Another option would be to store the configuration file outside of the container and edit it directly.

Documentation

Documentation for Graylog is hosted here. Please read through the docs and familiarize yourself with the functionality before opening an issue on GitHub.

License

This Docker image is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, see LICENSE.

Graylog itself is licensed under the GNU Public License 3.0, see license information.

tanner-g/graylog-docker