Object to string gets indexed as object in elasticsearch

Elastic Stack Logstash
1

I need to convert a field to string so it does not create multiple fields and subfields in elasticsearch.

Reason is I get logs from a source I can't control and they are in the format

data: {
  23423432_23434343: { ... }
}
data: {
 450546540_3450345: { ... }
}

and thousands of that

so I now have thousands of fields in kibana which basically makes it unusable

so i created in my logstash conf

if [plaindata] {
    mutate {
      convert => { "plaindata" => "string" }
    }
  }

but I still get plaindata.foo.bar.baz fields

is what I tried the correct way to handle this problem?
What I need is plaindata as a searchable field as it can contain valuable debug information

2

Maybe the json_encode filter could be useful?

3

that worked, thanks