NOTE: This processor is now part of Filebeat.

beats-processor-fingerprint plugin

beats-processor-fingerprint is a processor plugin for Elastic Beats that "fingerprints" events by computing a hash of fields in the event. This can be useful as a checksum of the data or it can be useful for deduplication purposes if the hash is used as a primary key in your data store.

Installation and Usage

Build the plugin. Go plugins are only supported on Linux at the current time. They must be compiled with the same Go version as the Beat it will be used with. Likewise this plugin must be compiled against the same Beat codebase version as the Beat it will be used with.

go build -buildmode=plugin

Start a Beat with the plugin.

filebeat -e --plugin ./processor-fingerprint-linux-amd64.so

Add the processor to your configuration file.

processors:
- fingerprint:
    hash: sha256
    encoding: hex
    target: fingerprint
    fields: [source, timestamp]

Configuration Options

• hash: The hashing algoritm to use. The supported algoritms are md5, sha1, sha224, sha256 (default), sha384, sha512, sha512_224, sha512_256, sha3_224, sha3_256, sha3_384, and sha3_512.
• encoding: Encoding type to use on the hash value. The supported encoding types are hex (default), base32, and base64.
• target: The name of the field to which the encoded hash value will be written. The default value is fingerprint.
• fields: A list of field names whose values will be concatenated and hashed. Missing fields will be ignored. The default value is [message].

Example Output

{
  "@timestamp": "2017-10-07T03:09:50.201Z",
  "@metadata": {
    "beat": "filebeat",
    "type": "doc",
    "version": "7.0.0-alpha1"
  },
  "source": "/home/andrew_kroh/go/src/github.com/elastic/beats/filebeat/messages",
  "offset": 68379,
  "message": "Oct  6 23:17:59 localhost systemd: Starting Session 6 of user andrew_kroh.",
  "beat": {
    "name": "host.example.com",
    "hostname": "host.example.com",
    "version": "7.0.0-alpha1"
  },
  "fingerprint": "42c4f7ffd2c28adbba04abf6c3bf28b3de9a8afea2227fcba8ac73d595a4209e"
}