Add Fluentd as a Receiver

You can use Elasticsearch, Kafka and Fluentd as log receivers in KubeSphere. This tutorial demonstrates:

• How to deploy Fluentd as a Deployment and create the corresponding Service and ConfigMap.
• How to add Fluentd as a log receiver to receive logs sent from Fluent Bit and then output to stdout.
• How to verify if Fluentd receives logs successfully.

Prerequisites

• You need a user granted a role including the permission of Cluster Management. For example, you can log in to the console as admin directly or create a new role with the permission and assign it to a user.

• Before adding a log receiver, you need to enable any of the logging, events, or auditing components. For more information, see Enable Pluggable Components. logging is enabled as an example in this tutorial.

Step 1: Deploy Fluentd as a Deployment

Usually, Fluentd is deployed as a DaemonSet in Kubernetes to collect container logs on each node. KubeSphere chooses Fluent Bit because of its low memory footprint. Besides, Fluentd features numerous output plugins. Hence, KubeSphere chooses to deploy Fluentd as a Deployment to forward logs it receives from Fluent Bit to more destinations such as S3, MongoDB, Cassandra, MySQL, syslog and Splunk.

Run the following commands:

cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: fluentd-config
  namespace: default
data:
  fluent.conf: |-
    # Receive logs sent from Fluent Bit on port 24224
    <source>
      @type forward
      port 24224
    </source>

    # Because this will send logs Fluentd received to stdout,
    # to avoid Fluent Bit and Fluentd loop logs collection,
    # add a filter here to avoid sending logs from the default namespace to stdout again
    <filter **>
      @type grep
      <exclude>
        key $.kubernetes.namespace_name
        pattern /^default$/
      </exclude>
    </filter>

    # Send received logs to stdout for demo/test purpose only
    # Various output plugins are supported to output logs to S3, MongoDB, Cassandra, MySQL, syslog, Splunk, etc.
    <match **>
      @type stdout
    </match>    
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
  labels:
    app: fluentd
  name: fluentd
  namespace: default
spec:
  replicas: 1
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: fluentd
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: fluentd
    spec:
      containers:
      - image: fluentd:v1.9.1-1.0
        imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
        name: fluentd
        ports:
        - containerPort: 24224
          name: forward
          protocol: TCP
        - containerPort: 5140
          name: syslog
          protocol: TCP
        volumeMounts:
        - mountPath: /fluentd/etc
          name: config
          readOnly: true
      volumes:
      - configMap:
          defaultMode: 420
          name: fluentd-config
        name: config
---
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
  labels:
    app: fluentd
  name: fluentd
  namespace: default
spec:
  ports:
  - name: forward
    port: 24224
    protocol: TCP
    targetPort: forward
  selector:
    app: fluentd
  sessionAffinity: None
  type: ClusterIP
EOF

Step 2: Add Fluentd as a Log Receiver

1. Log in to KubeSphere as admin. Click Platform in the upper-left corner and select Cluster Management.

   Note

   If you have enabled the multi-cluster feature, you can select a specific cluster.

2. On the Cluster Management page, go to Log Receivers in Cluster Settings.

3. Click Add Log Receiver and choose Fluentd.

4. Provide the Fluentd service address and port number.

5. Fluentd will appear in the receiver list on the Log Receivers page, the status of which is Collecting.

Step 3: Verify Fluentd is Receiving Logs Sent from Fluent Bit

1. Click Application Workloads on the Cluster Management page.

2. Select Workloads and then select the default project on the Deployments tab.

3. Click the fluentd item and then select the fluentd-xxxxxxxxx-xxxxx Pod.

4. Click the fluentd container.

5. On the fluentd container page, select the Container Logs tab.

6. You can see logs begin to scroll up continuously.

Thanks for the feedback. If you have a specific question about how to use KubeSphere, ask it on Slack. Open an issue in the GitHub repo if you want to report a problem or suggest an improvement.