elkstack

Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana stack. Due to the recommendations of the
community, we are not using the embedded elasticsearch functionality of logstash
at this point. This cookbook provides recipes for all three components, along
with wrapper recipes such as single or cluster to facilitate different use
cases.

This stack's design is intended for one or many standalone nodes, with a full
stack of elasticsearch, logstash, and kibana. The only difference between one
and many nodes is that elasticsearch is clustered together. Data dispatched to

Logstash on a particular node will use the local elasticsearch transport
interface to index those logs to the node (and thus, the cluster). HTTP traffic
dispatched to Kibana on port 80 on any node will also use the local
elasticsearch HTTP interface to fetch and manipulate data.

Please read the individual recipe summaries to understand what each recipe does,
as well as what each wrapper recipe is actually wrapping. As much as possible,
upstream attributes have been exposed/overriden for our needs.

Pre-requistes before converging this stack

• Please note that this cookbook does not restart elasticsearch automatically,
  in order to avoid causing an outage of the cluster. It does restart nginx and
  logstash, however. You will have to restart elasticsearch after the initial
  bootstrap. You may also need to bounce logstash if it seems confused about
  losing a connection to eleasticsearch (unusual, but happens).

• You may want to consider adjusting node['elasticsearch']['discovery']['search_query']
  if you are sharing one cluster among multiple environments. Just put a chef
  search in that attribute and this will use that search instead of one scoped to
  chef environments.

• The agent recipes requires a pre-generated SSL key and certificate with
  something like openssl req -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout lumberjack.key -out
lumberjack.crt -nodes -days 1000. This key and certificate data should be
  placed in data bag with name node['elkstack']['config']['lumberjack_data_bag']
  under key and certificate keys, and base64 encoded into a single line
  string. You may also supply these with some other method and populate the
  appropriate node.run_state values (see _secrets.rb for more details). Note
  that this is not a PKI trust model, but an
  explicit trust model.

[Changelog](CHANGELOG.md)

See CHANGELOG.md for additional information about changes to this stack over time.

Supported Platforms

Ubuntu 12.04

Ubuntu 14.04

CentOS 6.5

Attributes

<table>
<tr>
<th>Key</th>
<th>Type</th>
<th>Description</th>
<th>Default</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>['elkstack']['config']['logstash']['instance_name']</tt></td>
<td>String</td>
<td>Default logstash instance name</td>
<td><tt>server</tt></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>['elkstack']['config']['cluster']</tt></td>
<td>Boolean</td>
<td>Whether to search for and connect Elasticsearch to cluster nodes</td>
<td><tt>false</tt></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>['elasticsearch']['discovery']['search_query']</tt></td>
<td>String</td>
<td>A query to search for and connect Elasticsearch to cluster nodes</td>
<td>(see attributes/elasticsearch.rb)</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>['logstash_forwarder']['config']['files']</tt></td>
<td>Hash</td>
<td>See customizing the stack section below.</td>
<td>Most logs in /var/log</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>['elkstack']['config']['data_disk']['disk_config_type']</tt></td>
<td>Boolean or String</td>
<td>See customizing the stack section below.</td>
<td><tt>false</tt></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>['elkstack']['iptables']['enabled']</tt></td>
<td>Boolean</td>
<td>Enable/Disable iptables functionality</td>
<td><tt>true</tt></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>['elkstack']['config']['site_name']</tt></td>
<td>String</td>
<td>Control the name of the self-signed SSL key and cert in /etc/nginx/ssl</td>
<td><tt>kibana</tt></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>['elkstack']['config']['kibana']['redirect']</tt></td>
<td>Boolean</td>
<td>Enable/Disable nginx redirect for kibana from port 80 to port 443</td>
<td><tt>true</tt></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>node.run_state['elkstack_kibana_username']</tt> and <tt>['elkstack']['config']['kibana']['username']</tt></td>
<td>String</td>
<td>Default username for basic auth for kibana, run_state used first</td>
<td><tt>kibana</tt></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>node.run_state['elkstack_kibana_password']</tt></td>
<td>String</td>
<td>Password for basic auth for kibana</td>
<td>random from <tt>Opscode::OpenSSL::Password</tt></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><tt>['elkstack']['config']['lumberjack_data_bag']</tt></td>
<td>String</td>
<td>Data bag name for lumberjack key and certificate</td>
<td><tt>lumberjack</tt></td>
</tr>
</table>

Customizing the stack

To override local storage for elasticsearch nodes (the stack will format and mount, as well as configure elasticsearch), set ['elkstack']['config']['data_disk']['disk_config_type'] to custom and provide each storage device and mount point in the following way:
```ruby
disk_config = {
'file_system' => 'ext4',
'mount_options' => 'rw,user',
'mount_path' => '/usr/local/var/data/elasticsearch/disk1',
'format_command' => 'mkfs -t ext4 ',
'fs_check_command' => 'dumpe2fs'
}

node.override['elasticsearch']['data']['devices']['/dev/xvde1'] = disk_config
node.override['elasticsearch']['path']['data'] = disk_config['mount_path']
```

To add additional logstash configuration to this stack, simply add additional
templates in your wrapper cookbook. They should be placed in
"#{@basedir}/#{@instance}/etc/conf.d" (see the config provider in the logstash
cookbook). If you choose to use logstash-forwarder instead of the regular agent,
please see the hash structure in attributes/forwarder.rb for adding additional
files for the forwarder to watch and forward, node['logstash_forwarder']['config']['files'].

To override the nginx configuration, simply supply a new template and specify
your cookbook using ['kibana']['nginx']['template_cookbook'] and
['kibana']['nginx']['template']. You can also override just the password for
the reverse proxy using node.run_state['elkstack_password'].

By default, platformstack will call the `::agent recipe here. If you have a
need for the forwarder recipe instead, just please note that you should turn off
the platformstack flag for logging, and include the elkstack::agent recipe
directly.

To override anything else, set the appropriate node hash (logstash, kibana, or elasticsearch).

Usage

elkstack::default

Default recipe, does not do anything.

elkstack::single

A simple wrapper recipe that sets up Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Also
configures an rsyslog sink into logstash on the local box. Everything except
Logstash and Kibana is locked down to listen only on localhost.

elkstack::cluster

A simple wrapper recipe that sets up Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Also
configures an rsyslog sink into logstash on the local box. Sets the cluster flag
so that the elasticsearch recipe builds it in a cluster-friendly way.

elkstack::agent

A simple wrapper recipe that sets up a logstash agent on the local box. Also
configures an rsyslog sink into logstash on the local box.

elkstack::forwarder

A python-based alternative to the normal agent, configured simply to watch logs
forward them directly on to the cluster. This project is in heavy development,
and is not publishing releases very often, so the packaged versions may be quite
old or buggy. As of the addition of the recipe, the package was almost a year
behind current development, but only because there also had been no releases
either.

elkstack::elasticsearch

Leans on the upstream elasticsearch/cookbook-elasticsearch cookbook for much
of its work. We do override the default set of plugins to be installed, as well
as the amount of JVM heap. See attributes/default.rb for those settings.

This recipe also tags the node so that other nodes that run this recipe can
discover it, and configure Elasticsearch appropriately to join their cluster.
It uses a tag, the current chef environment, and the cluster name as the default
search criteria.

Most of this is configurable using the upstream Elasticsearch cookbook's
attributes, including the chef search itself. There is not an easy toggle to
turn off the search, however.
Enables iptables rules if default['elkstack']['iptables']['enabled'] not nil

elkstack::logstash

Leans on the upstream lusis/chef-logstash cookbook for much
of its work. We do override the default set of plugins to be installed, as well
as the amount of JVM heap. See attributes/default.rb for those settings.

elkstack::kibana

Leans on the upstream lusis/chef-kibana cookbook for most of its work. Sets up
an nginx site for kibana by default. By default, it also does not pass through
most of the http paths directly to elasticsearch (whitelist).

elkstack::java

Wrapper for a java recipe. This is not included on the run list normally, so if
you don't already, you must include this recipe or get another JVM installed
before including anything else in this cookbook.

elkstack::newrelic

Validates if there is a newrelic license set and based on that, see if the node
is tagged as 'elkstack' or 'elkstack_cluster' and creates a file with
elasticsearch details. Installs python, pip and setuptools packages in order to
support newrelic_meetme_plugin

elkstack::acl

Adds cluster node basic iptables rules and cluster iptables rules if appropriate attributes
are set.

elkstack::agent_acl

Adds agent node basic iptables rules if appropriate attributes are set.

elkstack::disk_setup

Look for node['elkstack']['config']['data_disk']['disk_config_type'] to be truthy, and configure the upstream elasticsearch cookbook to format, mount, and use devices appropriately.

elkstack::*_monitoring

These correspond with the recipes above, and just provide a way to pull out the
monitoring work to make the original recipes cleaner.

Miscellaneous

The wrapper recipes are single and cluster. These change attributes and then
invoke elasticsearch, logstash, kibana, and rsyslog. Finally, there are
utility recipes like java and newrelic (not invoked otherwise), as well as
acl which is called by _base if node['elkstack']['iptables']['enabled'].

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.

Authors

Author:: Rackspace (devops-chef@rackspace.com)

License

# Copyright 2014, Rackspace Hosting
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# Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
# you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
# You may obtain a copy of the License at
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#     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
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# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
# distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
# WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
# See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
# limitations under the License.
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