# Parse Logstash.log with logstash
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/parse-logstash-log-with-logstash/49061
**Category:** Logstash
**Created:** [May 3, 2016, 1:33pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/parse-logstash-log-with-logstash/49061 "2016-05-03T13:33:35Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@webofmars](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/webofmars)
#### Post date: [May 3, 2016, 1:33pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/parse-logstash-log-with-logstash/49061/1 "2016-05-03T13:33:35Z")
Hello,
That might sounds a bit silly question (or circular one...) but how do you parse logstah.log with logstash itself. I always thought that it was json format but the ':' at the start seems to say that it isn't.
tried
filter {
json {
source =\> "message"
}
}
and it does produce error :
{:timestamp=\>"2016-05-03T15:19:21.889000+0200", :message=\>"Error parsing json", :source=\>"message", :raw=\>"{:timestamp=\>"2016-05-03T14:12:18.094000+0200", :message=\>"SIGTERM received. Shutting down the pipeline.", :level=\>:warn}", :exception=\>#\, :level=\>:warn}
---
### Author:  [@magnusbaeck](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/magnusbaeck)
#### Post date: [May 8, 2016, 8:13pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/parse-logstash-log-with-logstash/49061/2 "2016-05-08T20:13:30Z")
Yeah, Logstash's log files aren't JSON. There's no simple way of parsing them. Work is ongoing to make Logstash being able to emit JSON logfiles. I dug up the GitHub issue for this just a few days ago and posted it when someone asked the same question.
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 4:58am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/parse-logstash-log-with-logstash/49061/3 "2017-07-06T04:58:49Z")