Installing Logstash on Ubuntu 18.04

Logstash is an open-source data collection engine that allows you to ingest and process data from various sources and send it to different destinations. It is an important component of the ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) stack, which is commonly used for log analysis and monitoring.

To install Logstash on Ubuntu 18.04, you can follow the steps below:

1. First, update your system's package index by running the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt update

2. Ensure that Java is installed on your system. Logstash requires Java 8 or higher. You can check if Java is installed by running the command:

java -version

If Java is not installed, you can install OpenJDK 8 by running the following command:

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk

3. After installing Java, you can proceed to download and install Logstash. The easiest way is to use the Debian package provided by Elastic. You can download it using the following command:

wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt install apt-transport-https
echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/7.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-7.x.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install logstash

4. Logstash is installed but needs a configuration file to start properly. Create a configuration file at /etc/logstash/conf.d directory, with a .conf extension. For example:

sudo nano /etc/logstash/conf.d/myconfig.conf

Edit the configuration file as per your requirements. The configuration defines input, filter, and output plugins that specify where to retrieve data from, how to process it, and where to send it. You can refer to the Logstash documentation for more details on configuring your specific use case.

5. Once you have configured Logstash, you can start the Logstash service by running the following command:

sudo systemctl start logstash

You can also enable Logstash to start on boot with the following command:

sudo systemctl enable logstash

That's it! Logstash is now installed and running on your Ubuntu 18.04 system. You can further explore Logstash documentation to learn more about its capabilities and advanced configurations.