# Winlogbeat to Kafka : failover or loadbalancer
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/winlogbeat-to-kafka-failover-or-loadbalancer/159549
**Category:** Beats
**Tags:** winlogbeat
**Created:** [December 5, 2018, 2:06pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/winlogbeat-to-kafka-failover-or-loadbalancer/159549 "2018-12-05T14:06:11Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@blenski](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/blenski)
#### Post date: [December 5, 2018, 2:06pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/winlogbeat-to-kafka-failover-or-loadbalancer/159549/1 "2018-12-05T14:06:11Z")
Hi
I am willing to set up winlogbeat to send logs to my Kafka cluster (3 machines)
I have seen that I can set several Kafka destination servers, thanks to the following config
output.kafka:
# initial brokers for reading cluster metadata
hosts: ["kafka1:9092", "kafka2:9092", "kafka3:9092"]
My question is : is that a fall over set up or a load balancing one ?
If I want to balance the charge should I put a VIP in front of the Kakfa or use the above setting ?
Thanks for your help
Bruno Lenski
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### Author:  [@bigphil](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/bigphil)
#### Post date: [December 5, 2018, 3:04pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/winlogbeat-to-kafka-failover-or-loadbalancer/159549/2 "2018-12-05T15:04:28Z")
According to [this](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/current/load-balancing.html) filebeat document, the Kafka output handles loadbalancing internally. I can only assume that Winlogbeat uses the same Kafka output as Filebeat.
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### Author:  [@steffens](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/steffens)
#### Post date: [December 6, 2018, 12:40pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/winlogbeat-to-kafka-failover-or-loadbalancer/159549/3 "2018-12-06T12:40:33Z")
When using kafka it is the client that is responsible for load balancing. It's a load-balance always service! Clients have to choose a partition and then send events to the current leader of that partition. Do not put kafka behind HAProxy or any other load balancer. The kafka leader provides a cluster state with a `(topic/partition ID)->kafka` host mapping to the client.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [January 3, 2019, 12:40pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/winlogbeat-to-kafka-failover-or-loadbalancer/159549/4 "2019-01-03T12:40:34Z")
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