Make logstash upload then exit

Elastic Stack Logstash
1

I've got what appears to be a unique situation. I am using Kibana to dashboard test pass data after a dev commits code. Because of that, my log data isn't received in real time. I basically have a file with all my logging data in it, and now I want to upload that data to Kibana. All the stuff I read about logstash appears to be geared towards a terminate-and-stay paradigm. I've been looking at command line options to see if I can't just get logstash to upload my file to kibana and then exit. But now I'm questioning if I'm doing the right thing. Should I even be using logstash for this? Or is there a better way of dealing with my needs?

In short, what I want is to automate the upload of a completed logfile to kibana. What is the recommended way to accomplish this.

2

You could do it using a stdin input, which causes logstash to exit when it reaches EOF. That said, logstash can burn a minute of CPU time during startup, so that's pretty expensive. It may be possible with filebeat, which is lighter weight, but I believe that it also architected to run forever as a service.

That said, if you have the resources to let logstash run as a service there are a number of ways you could feed files to it from time to time. file input, curl into an http input...

3

Actually, I DO have the resources to let logstash do its thing. I didn't know about the stdin mode. That sounds like my solution :smiley: