nicolasbaer / flume-ng-elasticsearch-serializer-num

An elasticsearch flume serializer with awareness for numerical value.

flume-ng-elasticsearch-serializer-num

An elasticsearch flume serializer with awareness for numerical value. This is a quick and dirty hack to support numerical values stored to elasticsearch in order to analyze it with Kibana. Please be aware that this implementation might not perform the very best and only use it with caution :)

Config

In order to attach this serializer to flume the following tasks need to be performed:

1. mvn clean assembly:assembly
2. copy the generated jar (*-with-dependencies-*) into the flume lib directory
3. define the following serializer: ch.creativecode.logging.ElasticsearchNumSerializer (e.g. a1.sinks.k1.serializer = ch.creativecode.logging.ElasticsearchNumSerializer)

EqualsInterceptor

This package includes an EqualsInterceptor to allow extracting header fields from the body with the following syntax: field=value In order to use it the following interceptor has to be defined: ch.creativecode.logging.EqualsInterceptor$Builder. Due to strange reasons, currently the Builder has to be specified instead of the Interceptor implementation.

KibanaTimeStampInterceptor

In order to use Kibana to analyze the data properly one has to deal with the timestamp. This does not come out-of-the-box with the Flume Elasticsearch sink. The KibanaTimeStampInterceptor does the following:

1. It looks for a header called @timestamp as Long (ms)
2. It converts the value to the proper ISODateTimeFormat
3. It stores the milliseconds as timestamp in the header. Apparently the Elasticsearch sink relies on this property.
   Therefore in order to use this interceptor, one has to set the @timestamp header to the event. Using the EqualsInterceptor described above the following pattern can be used in log4j: @timestamp=%d{UNIX_MILLIS} class=%c{1} %msg