How to reduce disk usage for metricbeat

[Gaurav_kr (Gaurav)]

Hi Team,

I am using metricbeat to monitor around 200+ environments, and using system module.
But it is comusing lot of disk space daily it use 10 GB of disk space to store the monitor data.
Can we do any work to make it less as we can see this is large space used have worked on some other monitoring tool also but haven't seen this much space getting used for a monitoring tool.
I did some changes in fields.yml file to change data type from long to float but this also not help much.
Team please help me or suggest what we can do to overcome this. Thank you.

[stephenb (Stephen Brown)]

What version are you on?

First, I would not change the field types. That's not going to make much of an impact.

Big things that make impact are

Adjusting the collection period

Being judicious about the metrics you're collecting

Often people drop / filter out the fields they don't need in the agent and host objects.

And if you're on one of the latest versions, you could look at synthetic source here

[Gaurav_kr (Gaurav)]

Hi @stephenb
I am using metricbeat 8.0.0, and how to remove the fields we are not using.

[stephenb (Stephen Brown)]

Per the docs here

[Gaurav_kr (Gaurav)]

Thank you @stephenb but still wanted to know is there any simple way to directly reduce the disk space as in drop_event or drop_field again it requires someone who should have knowledge of metrics used. Appreciate you help

[leandrojmp (Leandro Pereira)]

The simple way is to increase the period from the default 10s to something higher, like 20s or 30s, this will reduce the amount of logs sent.

Depending on what you want to monitor you can also disable some metricsets.