Hosts output target using AD Sites Services

Elastic Stack Beats
1

What happens when hosts is a domain record that returns multiple addresses ?
Does it use the first, all of them, only the ones that work, load balance.. ?

The goal was to use sites and services to always return the closest IP first for logstash.mydomain.com.

Config OK
logstash: logstash.mydomain.com:5044...
connection...
parse host... OK
dns lookup... OK
addresses: 192.168.100.11,168.200.11,192.168.300.11,192.168.400.11
dial up... OK
TLS... WARN secure connection disabled
talk to server... OK
Status : Stopped
Name : winlogbeat

2

It will try each IP until it successfully connects. It does this in a random order. https://github.com/elastic/beats/blob/768e58ede27f7a80b38c983a83537f8669a0cb04/libbeat/outputs/transport/util.go#L39-L57

It won't load balance unless you explicitly configure it to do so with loadbalance and workers. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/winlogbeat/current/logstash-output.html#_literal_worker_literal_2

3

Thats disappointing why random?

That takes away our ability to direct winlogbeat to the lostash host closest to the server without additional install logic.