cloudwatchlogsbeat

Cloudwatchlogsbeat

Cloudwatchlogsbeat is a beat for the elastic stack. Its purpose is to harvest data from AWS Cloudwatch Log Groups and ship them to a variety of sinks that include logstash, elasticsearch etc. The beat is production-tested and is currently being used to harvest some thousands of stream events per minute.

Description

Cloudwatchlogsbeat operates by monitoring a set of AWS Cloudwatch Log Groups specified in its configuration, which also defines a set of configuration values that influence the beat's operational behaviour. In general, the log groups are periodically probed for new streams which are then polled for new events.

The state of the beat is saved in a user-specified S3 bucket on a per-stream basis. This way, the beat knows what is the last event that was harvested per stream and can resume its operation once restarted.

The beat is fully concurrent in terms of the monitored log groups and streams and makes use of AWS SDK's exponential back-off retry policy for all its requests to the AWS APIs. However, the beat's operation is subject to AWS limitations and throttling policies which are summarized here.

Throttling errors are dealt with gracefully without losing stream events (stream monitoring is resumed from where it left off) and can be mitigated to some degree by tuning the beat's configuration with respect to the various refresh frequencies. The beat also defines two kinds of streams, frequently updated (aka hot) and standard, which can be configured differently to further control/reduce the rate of AWS API requests.

Setup / Installation

First of all, make sure that you have a working go installation (this includes a valid $GOPATH).

The following steps are necessary for a working installation:

$ go get -u github.com/e-travel/cloudwatchlogsbeat
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/e-travel/cloudwatchlogsbeat
$ go build -i # builds the beat and builds/installs the dependencies
$ ./cloudwatchlogsbeat -e -d '*'

AWS configuration

Cloudwatchlogsbeat authenticates with AWS services using the standard AWS guidelines. This means that the following environmental variables need to be set for the program to use:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY

Alternatively, if there are profiles setup in the file ~/.aws/credentials, the following environmental variables are necessary:

AWS_PROFILE

The AWS region must be set in the beat's configuration file.

If the beat is deployed to an EC2 instance, there's also the option of an IAM Role that is attached to the EC2 instance. In this case, the actions that must be allowed in the IAM policy document are as follows:

logs:GetLogEvents
logs:FilterLogEvents
logs:Describe*

plus permissions to the S3 bucket resource:

s3:GetObject
s3:ListBucket
s3:HeadObject
s3:PutObject

Tests

The beat's tests can be executed as follows:

$ go test -v -cover ./beater

The test coverage report can be generated by adding the -coverprofile=coverage.out switch to the above command. The generated coverage.out file can be then viewed using:

$ go tool cover -html=coverage.out

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/e-travel/cloudwatchlogsbeat. This project is intended to be a safe, welcoming space for collaboration, and contributors are expected to adhere to the Contributor Covenant code of conduct.

License

The beat is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.