Metricbeat

Metricbeat is a lightweight tool for collecting and shipping metrics.

Metricbeat collects a large set of valuable system metrics, including:

  • CPU usage statistics
  • Memory statistics
  • File and disk IO statistics
  • Per-process statistics
  • Network and socket statistics

On top of the system-level statistics, Metricbeat comes with modules that offer integrations to many well-known services like Docker, MongoDB, and MySQL. Check out the Modules page in the official Metricbeat documentation for more details on these integrations and how they work.

Installation

To download Metricbeat, visit the Metricbeat OSS downloads page.

You can find installation documentation for Metricbeat on the Installation page of the official Metricbeat website.

This documentation is written for versions 6.x of Metricbeat. Either make sure to install from the 6.x branch (https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/metricbeat/6.8/metricbeat-installation.html) or make sure to read https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/libbeat/7.6/breaking-changes-7.0.html to know what fields are available in the 7.x metrics.

Configuration

Because Humio supports parts of the ElasticSearch insertion API, you can send data from Metricbeat to Humio by configuring Metricbeat to use the built-in ElasticSearch output.

You can find configuration documentation for Metricbeat at the Metricbeat configuration page.

The following example shows a simple Metricbeat configuration collecting host metrics and sending them to Humio:

metricbeat.modules:
  - module: system
    enabled: true
    period: 10s
    metricsets:
      - cpu
      - load
      - filesystem
      - fsstat
      - memory
      - network
      - socket # linux only

output.elasticsearch:
  hosts: ["$YOUR_HUMIO_URL/api/v1/ingest/elastic-bulk"]
  username: my-organization
  password: $INGEST_TOKEN
Where:

  • $YOUR_HUMIO_URL — is the base URL of your Humio server (https://cloud.humio.com:443 or http://localhost:8080)
  • $INGEST_TOKEN — is the ingest token for your repository, (a string such as fS6Kdlb0clqe0UwPcc4slvNFP3Qn1COzG9DEVLw7v0Ii).

Metricbeat uses 9200 as the default port, if no port is specified. So if Humio is listening on the default ports 80 or 443, these ports should be explicitly put in the $YOUR_HUMIO_URL.

The Metricbeat configuration file is located at /etc/metricbeat/metricbeat.yml on Linux.

Running Metricbeat

Run Metricbeat as a service on Linux with the following commands

sudo systemctl enable metricbeat
sudo systemctl restart metricbeat

Adding fields

You can add fields with static values using the fields section. These fields will be added to each event.

Default fields

Metricbeat automatically sends the host name of the system along with the data. Humio adds the host name in the @host field to each event. It uses this field name to try not to collide with other fields in the event.

Host metrics example queries

Once you have data from Metricbeat in Humio, you can run some interesting queries, such as

  • Show CPU load for each host

    #type=beat | timechart(series=@host, function=max(system.load.1, as=load))

  • Show memory usage for each host

    #type=beat | timechart(series=@host, function=max(system.memory.actual.used.bytes))

  • Show disk free space (in gigabytes)

    #type=beat @host=host1  system.filesystem.mount_point="/"
| timechart(function=min(system.filesystem.free, as=free))
| eval(free=free/(1024*1024*1024))

  • Disk IO — show bytes read for each disk

    #type=beat @host=host1
| system.diskio.read.bytes=*
| timechart(
series=system.diskio.name,
function=counterAsRate(system.diskio.read.bytes), span=1m
)

  • Network traffic — Show bytes sent on the eth0 interface

    #type=beat @host=host1 system.network.name=eth0
| timechart(function=count(system.network.out.bytes), span=1m)

  • Show the top 10 processes using the most CPU resources

    #type=beat | system.process.name=*
| groupBy(system.process.name, function=avg(system.process.cpu.total.pct, as=cpu))
| sort(cpu, limit=10)