Data Collection

Getting Data From Syslog Into Elasticsearch Using Fluentd

Looking to get data out of syslog into elasticsearch? You can do that with fluentd in 10 minutes!

![](/images/plugin_icon/syslog.png)

→

![](/images/plugin_icon/elasticsearch.png)

Here is how:

$ gem install fluentd
$ gem install fluent-plugin-elasticsearch
$ touch fluentd.conf

fluentd.conf should look like this (just copy and paste this into fluentd.conf):

<source>
  type syslog
  port 5140
  bind 0.0.0.0
  tag system.local
</source>

<match **>
  type elasticsearch
  logstash_format true
  host <hostname> #(optional; default="localhost")
  port <port> #(optional; default=9200)
  index_name <index name> #(optional; default=fluentd)
  type_name <type name> #(optional; default=fluentd)
</match>

After that, you can start fluentd and everything should work:

$ fluentd -c fluentd.conf

Of course, this is just a quick example. If you are thinking of running fluentd in production, consider using td-agent, the enterprise version of Fluentd packaged and maintained by Treasure Data, Inc..