Is my data just not conforming to the pipeline? Filebeat not processing iptables

Elastic Stack Beats
1

Hopefully the group can help me out here... I've got my network infrastructure (coming out of a unifi controller) sending syslog to a filebeat over UDP/514. The messages are iptables logs. I'm not seeing any of the messages get processed into elasticsearch. I DID confirm that messages are coming into the filebeat host on 514 with a tcpdump. I also set up syslog-ng and created a test file for filebeat and tried to process it using "read from file" instead of "read from syslog". And even that fails...

Here's what my filebeat.yml looks like:

    filebeat.config:
      logging.to_files: false
      modules:
         path: ${path.config}/modules.d/*.yml
         reload.enabled: false

    logging.level: debug

    output.elasticsearch:
       hosts: '${ELASTICSEARCH_HOSTS}'
       username: '${ELASTICSEARCH_USERNAME}'
       password: '${ELASTICSEARCH_PASSWORD}'
    setup.kibana:
       host: "kib01:5601"

And here's my iptables.yml

    # Module: iptables
    # Docs: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/7.9/filebeat-module-iptables.html

    - module: iptables
      log:
         enabled: true
         var.convert_timezone: true
         var.syslog_host: localhost
         var.syslog_port: 514
         # Set which input to use between syslog (default) or file.
         var.input: "syslog"

And here's a sample of the log data that is being sent:

    Jan 26 09:18:47 30c04bee8c30,udm-1.8.5.2964 kernel: [322287.006104] IN=br30 OUT=eth4 MAC=f6:92:bf:7f:a0:e8:40:b4:cd:28:95:40:08:00 SRC=1.2.3.4 DST=4.3.2.1 LEN=136 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=63 ID=39401 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=37398 DPT=80 WINDOW=274 RES=0x00 ACK PSH URGP=0 
    Jan 26 09:18:47 30c04bee8c30,udm-1.8.5.2964 kernel: [322287.020222] IN=br10 OUT=eth4 MAC=f6:92:bf:7f:a0:e8:5c:3a:45:9a:c1:8d:08:00 SRC=1.2.3.4 DST=4.3.2.1 LEN=62 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=127 ID=38007 DF PROTO=UDP SPT=51931 DPT=443 LEN=42

Any help appreciated!

2

hi @rfischman, can you check the Filebeat logs, maybe they contain more information on what the issue is. For a better look can enable debug level for logging so you can see if any events are being processed?

3

So I'm not sure what happened but when I restarted it with with debug mode enabled, everything started working... I then switched it back to run without debugging and it continued to function.

Very odd behavior, but I'm not going to argue with it!