Geo Point with Elasticsearch 2.x

ELK Stack

An "ELK stack" refers to logstash, elasticsearch, and kibana. It's worth noting that one should always ensure the versions they use match up on the compatibility matrix.

Back in the kibana 3 days, things were pretty magical. There was less integration with elasticsearch and kibana was mostly left up to guess what was in elasticsearch.

Kibana 4

Kibana 4 has significantly more features and more integration with elasticsearch, but it means a lot of added complexity. The number one headache I faced was putting a geo_point into elasticsearch so that kibana 4 could plot it. I had the geo coordinates, so it seemed like sticking it into a geo_point field should be absolutely trivial.

Unfortunately, you can't just tell logstash that these coordinates are geographical coordinates. That's because logstash will speak JSON and geo_point is not a valid type.

ELK and geo_point

In order to get our coordinates from logstash to a kibana 4 map, we have two options. Our first option is to issue a curl request against elasticsearch that will modify the index. In my opinion, this is a sub-par option. The other option is to generate a new template to be used on a new index that includes the coordinates. This means doing everything within logstash.

Logstash Template

The default template for any elasticsearch index matching "logstash-*" is "elasticsearch-template.json" and it's location depends on how you chose to install logstash.

It's contents will look like this:

{
  "template": "logstash-*",
  "settings": {
    "index.refresh_interval": "5s"
  },
  "mappings": {
    "_default_": {
       "_all": {"enabled": true, "omit_norms": true},
       "dynamic_templates": [ {
         "message_field": {
           "match": "message",
           "match_mapping_type": "string",
           "mapping": {
             "type": "string", "index": "analyzed", "omit_norms": true
           }
         }
       }, {
         "string_fields": {
           "match": "*",
           "match_mapping_type": "string",
           "mapping": {
             "type": "string", "index": "analyzed", "omit_norms": true,
               "fields": {
                 "raw": {"type": "string", "index": "not_analyzed", "ignore_above": 256}
               }
           }
         }
       } ],
       "properties": {
         "@version": { "type": "string", "index": "not_analyzed" },
         "geoip"  : {
           "type": "object",
             "dynamic": true,
             "properties": {
               "location": { "type": "geo_point" }
             }
         }
       }
    }
  }
}

This geoip field is for if we're providing an IP address that we want processed and turned into geographical coordinates. In our scenario, we already have this data, so this field is useless. However, we do need a geo_point field.

Let's create /etc/logstash/templates/monster.json:

{
  "template": "monster-*",
  "settings": {
    "index.refresh_interval": "60s"
  },
  "mappings": {
    "_default_": {
      "_all": {"enabled": true, "omit_norms": true},
      "dynamic_templates": [ {
        "message_field": {
          "match": "message",
          "match_mapping_type": "string",
          "mapping": {
            "type": "string", "index": "analyzed", "omit_norms": true
          }
        }
      }, {
        "string_fields": {
          "match": "*",
          "match_mapping_type": "string",
          "mapping": {
            "type": "string", "index": "analyzed", "omit_norms": true,
            "fields": {
              "raw": {"type": "string", "index": "not_analyzed", "ignore_above": 256}
            }
          }
        }
      } ],
      "properties": {
        "@version": { "type": "string", "index": "not_analyzed" },
        "lonlat": { "type": "geo_point" }
      }
    }
  }
}

What changed:

• Template name changed
• The geoip object was removed
• The lonlat field was added

Logstash Configuration

Everything in logstash is driven by the configuration files. These are usually located in /etc/logstash/conf.d/<filename>.conf.

To get this working, we need to ensure that the lonlat field is populated and we need to make sure the output uses the correct index name and template.

The filter { } section is relatively simple. In my case, I had the data, but the longitude and latitude fields were flipped.

My filter section of /etc/logstash/conf.d/monster.json:

filter {
  # Monster Attacks
  if [type] == "monster_data" {
    # [...]
    if [monster_location] {
      grok {
        match => [ "monster_location", "%{BASE10NUM:latitude:float},%{BASE10NUM:longitude:float}" ]
      }
      mutate {
        add_field => [ "[lonlat]", "%{longitude}" ]
        add_field => [ "[lonlat]", "%{latitude}" ]
      }
    }
  }
}

The next thing we need is an output to elasticsearch that pulls all of these modifications together.

output {
  if [type] == "monster_data" {
    # Send to elasticsearch set hosts entry to the IP of your elasticsearch node
    elasticsearch {
      template => "/etc/logstash/templates/monster.json"
      template_overwrite => true
      hosts => "127.0.0.1:9200"
      workers => "2"
      index =>  "monster-%{+YYYY.MM.dd}"
    }
  }
}

This is an output to elasticsearch that uses our custom template.

Summary

Now, feel free to start ingesting data. When you try to plot these points on a map within Kibana 4, you'll be able to use the lonlat field that we created.

Overall, this is actually a very simple thing to do. It's just been documented very poorly. I hope that this helps others learn about storing a geo_point field as well as working with logstash templates. :)