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Get started with ECS Logging .NET

If you want to integrate with an existing logger emitting ECS json to a file or stdout/stderr.

Choose one of our formatters:

If you want to write the logs directly to one of Elastic’s endpoints (e.g Elastic Cloud / Elasticsearch)

Choose one of our data shipping loggers:

If you are using the Elastic APM .NET agent, log correlation can be configured to inject trace, transaction and span id fields into log events.

By default the ECS logging integrations will read tracing information from System.Diagnostics.Activity if the APM logging corrolation libraries are not installed.

If you are using one of our log formatters you can use the following methods to ship these logs to Elastic.

  1. Follow the Filebeat quick start
  2. Add the following configuration to your filebeat.yaml file.

For Filebeat 7.16+

filebeat.inputs:
- type: filestream 1
  paths: /path/to/logs.json
  parsers:
    - ndjson:
      overwrite_keys: true 2
      add_error_key: true 3
      expand_keys: true 4

processors: 5
  - add_host_metadata: ~
  - add_cloud_metadata: ~
  - add_docker_metadata: ~
  - add_kubernetes_metadata: ~
  1. Use the filestream input to read lines from active log files.
  2. Values from the decoded JSON object overwrite the fields that Filebeat normally adds (type, source, offset, etc.) in case of conflicts.
  3. Filebeat adds an "error.message" and "error.type: json" key in case of JSON unmarshalling errors.
  4. Filebeat will recursively de-dot keys in the decoded JSON, and expand them into a hierarchical object structure.
  5. Processors enhance your data. See processors to learn more.

For Filebeat < 7.16

filebeat.inputs:
- type: log
  paths: /path/to/logs.json
  json.keys_under_root: true
  json.overwrite_keys: true
  json.add_error_key: true
  json.expand_keys: true

processors:
- add_host_metadata: ~
- add_cloud_metadata: ~
- add_docker_metadata: ~
- add_kubernetes_metadata: ~
  1. Make sure your application logs to stdout/stderr.
  2. Follow the Run Filebeat on Kubernetes guide.
  3. Enable hints-based autodiscover (uncomment the corresponding section in filebeat-kubernetes.yaml).
  4. Add these annotations to your pods that log using ECS loggers. This will make sure the logs are parsed appropriately.
annotations:
  co.elastic.logs/json.overwrite_keys: true 1
  co.elastic.logs/json.add_error_key: true 2
  co.elastic.logs/json.expand_keys: true 3
  1. Values from the decoded JSON object overwrite the fields that Filebeat normally adds (type, source, offset, etc.) in case of conflicts.
  2. Filebeat adds an "error.message" and "error.type: json" key in case of JSON unmarshalling errors.
  3. Filebeat will recursively de-dot keys in the decoded JSON, and expand them into a hierarchical object structure.
  1. Make sure your application logs to stdout/stderr.
  2. Follow the Run Filebeat on Docker guide.
  3. Enable hints-based autodiscover.
  4. Add these labels to your containers that log using ECS loggers. This will make sure the logs are parsed appropriately.
labels:
  co.elastic.logs/json.overwrite_keys: true 1
  co.elastic.logs/json.add_error_key: true 2
  co.elastic.logs/json.expand_keys: true 3
  1. Values from the decoded JSON object overwrite the fields that Filebeat normally adds (type, source, offset, etc.) in case of conflicts.
  2. Filebeat adds an "error.message" and "error.type: json" key in case of JSON unmarshalling errors.
  3. Filebeat will recursively de-dot keys in the decoded JSON, and expand them into a hierarchical object structure.

For more information, see the Filebeat reference.