"host.name" value ignored by metricbeat arbitrarily

[Brinckerkoff (Brin)]

Hi everyone,

I'm experiencing an unexpected behaviour from metricbeat in some hosts: despite specifying a "host.name" in the "name" field in the metricbeat.yml configuration file, the beat overwrites this value with the hostname of the host. We have several hosts configured exactly in the same way, the only difference between them is the specified host.name, so I don't understand why the same configuration does not behave in the same way in every host.

In kibana I can see that the field "host.name" is filled with the hostname rather than the value I assigned in the configuration.

The fragment of the configuration in which I specify the host.name:

metricbeat.config.modules:
  path: ${path.config}/modules.d/*.yml
  reload.enabled: false

setup.template.settings:
  index.number_of_shards: 1
  index.codec: best_compression

name: someName

All the hosts are CentOS 7.3, their specs are very similar. Does somebody know why does that happen?

Thank you in advance

[Kaiyan_Sheng]

Hi @Brinckerkoff, thanks for posting here. I couldn't reproduce it when I tried with name: test specified in metricbeat.yml. What module are you running?