Run the latest version of the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack with Docker and Docker Compose.
It will give you the ability to analyze any data set by using the searching/aggregation capabilities of Elasticsearch and the visualization power of Kibana.
Based on the official Docker images:
Note: Other branches in this project are available:
- ELK 5 with X-Pack support: https://github.com/deviantony/docker-elk/tree/x-pack
- ELK 5 in Vagrant: https://github.com/deviantony/docker-elk/tree/vagrant
- ELK 5 with Search Guard: https://github.com/deviantony/docker-elk/tree/searchguard
- Install Docker version 1.10.0+
- Install Docker Compose version 1.6.0+
- Clone this repository
On distributions which have SELinux enabled out-of-the-box you will need to either re-context the files or set SELinux into Permissive mode in order for docker-elk to start properly. For example on Redhat and CentOS, the following will apply the proper context:
$ chcon -R system_u:object_r:admin_home_t:s0 docker-elk/
Start the ELK stack using docker-compose
:
$ docker-compose up
You can also choose to run it in background (detached mode):
$ docker-compose up -d
Give Kibana about 2 minutes to initialize, then access the Kibana web UI by hitting https://localhost:5601 with a web browser.
By default, the stack exposes the following ports:
- 5000: Logstash TCP input.
- 9200: Elasticsearch HTTP
- 9300: Elasticsearch TCP transport
- 5601: Kibana
WARNING: If you're using boot2docker
, you must access it via the boot2docker
IP address instead of localhost
.
WARNING: If you're using Docker Toolbox, you must access it via the docker-machine
IP address instead of
localhost
.
Now that the stack is running, you will want to inject some log entries. The shipped Logstash configuration allows you to send content via TCP:
$ nc localhost 5000 < /path/to/logfile.log
When Kibana launches for the first time, it is not configured with any index pattern.
NOTE: You need to inject data into Logstash before being able to configure a Logstash index pattern via the Kibana web UI. Then all you have to do is hit the Create button.
Refer to Connect Kibana with Elasticsearch for detailed instructions about the index pattern configuration.
Run this command to create a Logstash index pattern:
$ curl -XPUT -D- 'https://localhost:9200/.kibana/index-pattern/logstash-*' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"title" : "logstash-*", "timeFieldName": "@timestamp", "notExpandable": true}'
This command will mark the Logstash index pattern as the default index pattern:
$ curl -XPUT -D- 'https://localhost:9200/.kibana/config/5.5.0' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{"defaultIndex": "logstash-*"}'
NOTE: Configuration is not dynamically reloaded, you will need to restart the stack after any change in the configuration of a component.
The Kibana default configuration is stored in kibana/config/kibana.yml
.
It is also possible to map the entire config
directory instead of a single file.
The Logstash configuration is stored in logstash/config/logstash.yml
.
It is also possible to map the entire config
directory instead of a single file, however you must be aware that
Logstash will be expecting a
log4j2.properties
file for its own
logging.
The Elasticsearch configuration is stored in elasticsearch/config/elasticsearch.yml
.
You can also specify the options you want to override directly via environment variables:
elasticsearch:
environment:
network.host: "_non_loopback_"
cluster.name: "my-cluster"
Follow the instructions from the Wiki: Scaling out Elasticsearch
The data stored in Elasticsearch will be persisted after container reboot but not after container removal.
In order to persist Elasticsearch data even after removing the Elasticsearch container, you'll have to mount a volume on
your Docker host. Update the elasticsearch
service declaration to:
elasticsearch:
volumes:
- /path/to/storage:/usr/share/elasticsearch/data
This will store Elasticsearch data inside /path/to/storage
.
NOTE: beware of these OS-specific considerations:
- Linux: the unprivileged
elasticsearch
user is used within the Elasticsearch image, therefore the mounted data directory must be owned by the uid1000
. - macOS: the default Docker for Mac configuration allows mounting files from
/Users/
,/Volumes/
,/private/
, and/tmp
exclusively. Follow the instructions from the documentation to add more locations.
To add plugins to any ELK component you have to:
- Add a
RUN
statement to the correspondingDockerfile
(eg.RUN logstash-plugin install logstash-filter-json
) - Add the associated plugin code configuration to the service configuration (eg. Logstash input/output)
- Rebuild the images using the
docker-compose build
command
A few extensions are available inside the extensions
directory. These extensions provide features which
are not part of the standard Elastic stack, but can be used to enrich it with extra integrations.
The documentation for these extensions is provided inside each individual subdirectory, on a per-extension basis. Some of them require manual changes to the default ELK configuration.
By default, both Elasticsearch and Logstash start with 1/4 of the total host memory allocated to the JVM Heap Size.
The startup scripts for Elasticsearch and Logstash can append extra JVM options from the value of an environment variable, allowing the user to adjust the amount of memory that can be used by each component:
Service | Environment variable |
---|---|
Elasticsearch | ES_JAVA_OPTS |
Logstash | LS_JAVA_OPTS |
To accomodate environments where memory is scarce (Docker for Mac has only 2 GB available by default), the Heap Size
allocation is capped by default to 256MB per service in the docker-compose.yml
file. If you want to override the
default JVM configuration, edit the matching environment variable(s) in the docker-compose.yml
file.
For example, to increase the maximum JVM Heap Size for Logstash:
logstash:
environment:
LS_JAVA_OPTS: "-Xmx1g -Xms1g"
As for the Java Heap memory (see above), you can specify JVM options to enable JMX and map the JMX port on the docker host.
Update the {ES,LS}_JAVA_OPTS
environment variable with the following content (I've mapped the JMX service on the port
18080, you can change that). Do not forget to update the -Djava.rmi.server.hostname
option with the IP address of your
Docker host (replace DOCKER_HOST_IP):
logstash:
environment:
LS_JAVA_OPTS: "-Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=18080 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.rmi.port=18080 -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=DOCKER_HOST_IP -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.local.only=false"