ELK Integration for Logging

Document updated on Sep 21, 2022

KrakenD can push logs to external services; a good example is an integration with the ELK Stack (Elastic + Logstash + Kibana). The ELK integration allows you to have KrakenD pushing logs to your Elastic server and visualize them through a Kibana dashboard.

The Kibana dashboard lets you monitor the logging activity of the gateway and identify problems quickly. The included dashboard is a starting point that provides typical graphs and metrics, but you can extend it as per your needs and add other metrics to watch.

ELK Configuration

The configuration you need on your krakend.json to enable ELK integration is:

{
  "$schema": "https://www.krakend.io/schema/v2.6/krakend.json",
  "version": 3,
  "extra_config": {
    "telemetry/logging": {
      "level": "DEBUG",
      "@comment": "Prefix should always be inside [] to keep the grok expression working",
      "prefix": "[KRAKEND]",
      "syslog": false,
      "stdout": true
    },
    "telemetry/gelf": {
      "address": "logstash:12201",
      "enable_tcp": false
    }
  }
}

There’s nothing else on KrakenD that you need to do.

Logstash and Kibana configuration

The configuration files you need for Logstash and Kibana can be downloaded from the Telemetry Dashboards repository.

Logstash

The logstash.conf file includes an example of a Logstash configuration. First, change the hostname of your Elasticsearch server and any custom ports you might use. Then, start Logstash with this configuration to properly ingest KrakenD logs.

Kibana

To import the Kibana dashboard included in the ELK repository above, execute the following command once your Kibana is up and running. Replace localhost:5601 if needed:

$curl -X POST "localhost:5601/api/saved_objects/_import" -H "kbn-xsrf: true" --form [email protected] -H "kbn-xsrf: true"

ELK live demo

If you want to see how this works, you can start the KrakenD Playground.