Configure general settings

You can specify settings in the filebeat.yml config file to control the general behavior of Filebeat. This includes:

These options are in the filebeat namespace.

The root path of the registry. If a relative path is used, it is considered relative to the data path. See the Directory layout section for details. The default is ${path.data}/registry.

filebeat.registry.path: registry

The permissions mask to apply on registry data file. The default value is 0600. The permissions option must be a valid Unix-style file permissions mask expressed in octal notation. In Go, numbers in octal notation must start with 0.

The most permissive mask allowed is 0640. If a higher permissions mask is specified via this setting, it will be subject to an umask of 0027.

This option is not supported on Windows.

Examples:

filebeat.registry.file_permissions: 0600

The timeout value that controls when registry entries are written to disk (flushed). When an unwritten update exceeds this value, it triggers a write to disk. When registry.flush is set to 0s, the registry is written to disk after each batch of events has been published successfully. The default value is 0s.

Prior to Filebeat 7.0 the registry is stored in a single file. When you upgrade to 7.0, Filebeat will automatically migrate the old Filebeat 6.x registry file to use the new directory format. Filebeat looks for the file in the location specified by filebeat.registry.path. If you changed the path while upgrading, set filebeat.registry.migrate_file to point to the old registry file.

filebeat.registry.path: ${path.data}/registry
filebeat.registry.migrate_file: /path/to/old/registry_file

The registry will be migrated to the new location only if a registry using the directory format does not already exist.

[6.0.0] Deprecated in 6.0.0. Use Input config instead.

The full path to the directory that contains additional input configuration files. Each configuration file must end with .yml. Each config file must also specify the full Filebeat config hierarchy even though only the inputs part of each file is processed. All global options, such as registry_file, are ignored.

The config_dir option MUST point to a directory other than the directory where the main Filebeat config file resides.

If the specified path is not absolute, it is considered relative to the configuration path. See the Directory layout section for details.

filebeat.config_dir: path/to/configs

How long Filebeat waits on shutdown for the publisher to finish sending events before Filebeat shuts down.

By default, this option is disabled, and Filebeat does not wait for the publisher to finish sending events before shutting down. This means that any events sent to the output, but not acknowledged before Filebeat shuts down, are sent again when you restart Filebeat. For more details about how this works, see How does Filebeat ensure at-least-once delivery?.

You can configure the shutdown_timeout option to specify the maximum amount of time that Filebeat waits for the publisher to finish sending events before shutting down. If all events are acknowledged before shutdown_timeout is reached, Filebeat will shut down.

There is no recommended setting for this option because determining the correct value for shutdown_timeout depends heavily on the environment in which Filebeat is running and the current state of the output.

Example configuration:

filebeat.shutdown_timeout: 5s

These options are supported by all Elastic Beats. Because they are common options, they are not namespaced.

Here is an example configuration:

name: "my-shipper"
tags: ["service-X", "web-tier"]

The name of the Beat. If this option is empty, the hostname of the server is used. The name is included as the agent.name field in each published transaction. You can use the name to group all transactions sent by a single Beat.

Example:

name: "my-shipper"

A list of tags that the Beat includes in the tags field of each published transaction. Tags make it easy to group servers by different logical properties. For example, if you have a cluster of web servers, you can add the "webservers" tag to the Beat on each server, and then use filters and queries in the Kibana web interface to get visualisations for the whole group of servers.

Example:

tags: ["my-service", "hardware", "test"]

Optional fields that you can specify to add additional information to the output. Fields can be scalar values, arrays, dictionaries, or any nested combination of these. By default, the fields that you specify here will be grouped under a fields sub-dictionary in the output document. To store the custom fields as top-level fields, set the fields_under_root option to true.

Example:

fields: {project: "myproject", instance-id: "574734885120952459"}

If this option is set to true, the custom fields are stored as top-level fields in the output document instead of being grouped under a fields sub-dictionary. If the custom field names conflict with other field names, then the custom fields overwrite the other fields.

Example:

fields_under_root: true
fields:
  instance_id: i-10a64379
  region: us-east-1

A list of processors to apply to the data generated by the beat.

See Processors for information about specifying processors in your config.

Sets the maximum number of CPUs that can be executing simultaneously. The default is the number of logical CPUs available in the system.