Amazon Kinesis Data Streams

Send logs to Amazon Kinesis Streams

The Amazon Kinesis Data Streams output plugin allows to ingest your records into the Kinesis service.

This is the documentation for the core Fluent Bit Kinesis plugin written in C. It has all the core features of the aws/amazon-kinesis-streams-for-fluent-bit Golang Fluent Bit plugin released in 2019. The Golang plugin was named kinesis; this new high performance and highly efficient kinesis plugin is called kinesis_streams to prevent conflicts/confusion.

Currently, this kinesis_streams plugin will always use a random partition key when uploading records to kinesis via the PutRecords API.

See here for details on how AWS credentials are fetched.

Configuration Parameters

Key	Description
region	The AWS region.
stream	The name of the Kinesis Streams Delivery stream that you want log records sent to.
time_key	Add the timestamp to the record under this key. By default the timestamp from Fluent Bit will not be added to records sent to Kinesis.
time_key_format	strftime compliant format string for the timestamp; for example, the default is '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S'. Supports millisecond precision with '%3N' and supports nanosecond precision with '%9N' and '%L'; for example, adding '%3N' to support millisecond '%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S.%3N'. This option is used with time_key.
log_key	By default, the whole log record will be sent to Kinesis. If you specify a key name with this option, then only the value of that key will be sent to Kinesis. For example, if you are using the Fluentd Docker log driver, you can specify log_key log and only the log message will be sent to Kinesis.
role_arn	ARN of an IAM role to assume (for cross account access).
endpoint	Specify a custom endpoint for the Kinesis API.
sts_endpoint	Custom endpoint for the STS API.
auto_retry_requests	Immediately retry failed requests to AWS services once. This option does not affect the normal Fluent Bit retry mechanism with backoff. Instead, it enables an immediate retry with no delay for networking errors, which may help improve throughput when there are transient/random networking issues. This option defaults to true.
external_id	Specify an external ID for the STS API, can be used with the role_arn parameter if your role requires an external ID.

Getting Started

In order to send records into Amazon Kinesis Data Streams, you can run the plugin from the command line or through the configuration file:

Command Line

The kinesis_streams plugin, can read the parameters from the command line through the -p argument (property), e.g:

$ fluent-bit -i cpu -o kinesis_streams -p stream=my-stream -p region=us-west-2 -m '*' -f 1

Configuration File

In your main configuration file append the following Output section:

[OUTPUT]
    Name  kinesis_streams
    Match *
    region us-east-1
    stream my-stream

Permissions

The following AWS IAM permissions are required to use this plugin:

{
	"Version": "2012-10-17",
	"Statement": [{
		"Effect": "Allow",
		"Action": [
			"kinesis:PutRecords"
		],
		"Resource": "*"
	}]
}

Worker support

Fluent Bit 1.7 adds a new feature called workers which enables outputs to have dedicated threads. This kinesis_streams plugin fully supports workers.

Example:

[OUTPUT]
    Name  kinesis_streams
    Match *
    region us-east-1
    stream my-stream
    workers 2

If you enable a single worker, you are enabling a dedicated thread for your Kinesis output. We recommend starting with without workers, evaluating the performance, and then adding workers one at a time until you reach your desired/needed throughput. For most users, no workers or a single worker will be sufficient.

AWS for Fluent Bit

Amazon distributes a container image with Fluent Bit and these plugins.

GitHub

github.com/aws/aws-for-fluent-bit

Amazon ECR Public Gallery

aws-for-fluent-bit

Our images are available in Amazon ECR Public Gallery. You can download images with different tags by following command:

docker pull public.ecr.aws/aws-observability/aws-for-fluent-bit:<tag>

For example, you can pull the image with latest version by:

docker pull public.ecr.aws/aws-observability/aws-for-fluent-bit:latest

If you see errors for image pull limits, try log into public ECR with your AWS credentials:

aws ecr-public get-login-password --region us-east-1 | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin public.ecr.aws

You can check the Amazon ECR Public official doc for more details.

Docker Hub

amazon/aws-for-fluent-bit

Amazon ECR

You can use our SSM Public Parameters to find the Amazon ECR image URI in your region:

aws ssm get-parameters-by-path --path /aws/service/aws-for-fluent-bit/

For more see the AWS for Fluent Bit github repo.