Amazon Data Firehose

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| | |
| --- | --- |
| Version | 1.4.0 (View all) |
| Compatible Kibana version(s) | 8.13.0 or higher |
| Supported Serverless project types
What’s this? | Security
Observability |
| Subscription level
What’s this? | Basic |
| Level of support
What’s this? | Elastic |

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Amazon Data Firehose integration offers users a way to stream logs and CloudWatch metrics from Firehose to Elastic Cloud. This integration includes predefined rules that automatically route AWS service logs and CloudWatch metrics to the respective integrations, which include field mappings, ingest pipelines, and predefined dashboards.

Here is a list of log types that are supported by this integration:

Here is a list of CloudWatch metrics that are supported by this integration:

It is not possible to configure a delivery stream to send data to Elastic Cloud via PrivateLink (VPC endpoint). This is a current limitation in Firehose, which we are working with AWS to resolve.

1. Install the relevant integrations in Kibana

   In order to make the most of your data, install AWS integrations to load index templates, ingest pipelines, and dashboards into Kibana. In Kibana, navigate to Management > Integrations in the sidebar. Find the AWS integration by searching or browsing the catalog.

   

   Navigate to the Settings tab and click Install AWS assets. Confirm by clicking Install AWS in the popup.

   

2. Create a delivery stream in Amazon Data Firehose

   Sign into the AWS console and navigate to Amazon Data Firehose. Click Create Firehose stream. Configure the delivery stream using the following settings:

   

   Choose source and destination

   Unless you are streaming data from Kinesis Data Streams, set source to Direct PUT (see Setup guide for more details on data sources).

   Set destination to Elastic.

   Delivery stream name

   Provide a meaningful name that will allow you to identify this delivery stream later.

   

   Destination settings

   1. Set Elastic endpoint URL to point to your Elasticsearch cluster running in Elastic Cloud. This endpoint can be found in the Elastic Cloud console. An example is https://my-deployment-28u274.es.eu-west-1.aws.found.io.

   2. API key should be a Base64 encoded Elastic API key, which can be created in Kibana by following the instructions under API Keys. If you are using an API key with “Restricted privileges”, be sure to review the Indices privileges to provide at least "auto_configure" & "write" permissions for the indices you will be using with this delivery stream. By default, logs will be stored in logs-awsfirehose-default index and metrics will be stored in metrics-aws.cloudwatch-default index. Therefore, Elastic highly recommends giving logs-awsfirehose-default and metrics-aws.cloudwatch-default indices with "write" privilege.

   3. We recommend leaving Content encoding set to GZIP for improved network efficiency.

   4. Retry duration determines how long Firehose continues retrying the request in the event of an error. A duration of 60-300s should be suitable for most use cases.

   5. Elastic requires a Buffer size of 1MiB to avoid exceeding the Elasticsearch http.max_content_length setting (typically 100MB) when the buffer is uncompressed.

   6. The default Buffer interval of 60s is recommended to ensure data freshness in Elastic.

   7. Parameters

      1. Elastic recommends only setting the es_datastream_name parameter when ingesting logs that are not supported by this Firehose integration. If this parameter is not specified, data is sent to the logs-awsfirehose-default index by default and the routing rules defined in this integration will be applied automatically. Please make sure the index specified with this es_datastream_name parameter has the proper permission given by the API key.

         

      2. The include_cw_extracted_fields parameter is optional and can be set when using a CloudWatch logs subscription filter as the Firehose data source. When set to true, extracted fields generated by the filter pattern in the subscription filter will be collected. Setting this parameter can add many fields into each record and may significantly increase data volume in Elasticsearch. As such, use of this parameter should be carefully considered and used only when the extracted fields are required for specific filtering and/or aggregation.

      3. The include_event_original field is optional and should only be used for debugging purposes. When set to true, each log record will contain an additional field named event.original, which contains the raw (unprocessed) log message. This parameter will increase the data volume in Elasticsearch and should be used with care.

3. Send data to the Firehose delivery stream

   1. logs Consult the AWS documentation for details on how to configure a variety of log sources to send data to Firehose delivery streams.
   2. metrics Consult the AWS documentation for details on how to set up a metric stream in CloudWatch and Custom setup with Firehose to send metrics to Firehose. For Elastic, we only support JSON and OpenTelemetry 1.0.0 formats for the metrics.