Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

Send logs to Amazon Kinesis Firehose

The Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose output plugin lets you ingest your records into the Firehose service.

This is the documentation for the core Fluent Bit Firehose plugin written in C. It can replace the aws/amazon-kinesis-firehose-for-fluent-bit Golang Fluent Bit plugin. The Golang plugin was named firehose. This new Firehose plugin is called kinesis_firehose to prevent conflicts/confusion.

See AWS credentials for details on how AWS credentials are fetched.

Configuration parameters

This plugin uses the following configuration parameters:

Key	Description	Default
region	The AWS region .	none
delivery_stream	The name of the Kinesis Firehose Delivery stream that you want log records sent to.	none
time_key	Add the timestamp to the record under this key. By default, the timestamp from Fluent Bit won't be added to records sent to Kinesis.	none
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 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.	none
log_key	By default, the whole log record will be sent to Firehose. If you specify a key name with this option, then only the value of that key will be sent to Firehose. 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 Firehose.	none
compression	Compression type for Firehose records. Each log record is individually compressed and sent to Firehose. Supported values: gzip. arrow. arrow is only an available if Apache Arrow was enabled at compile time. Defaults to no compression.	none
role_arn	ARN of an IAM role to assume (for cross account access`).	none
endpoint	Specify a custom endpoint for the Firehose API.	none
sts_endpoint	Custom endpoint for the STS API.	none
auto_retry_requests	Immediately retry failed requests to AWS services once. This option doesn't affect the normal Fluent Bit retry mechanism with backoff. Instead, it enables an immediate retry with no delay for networking errors, which can help improve throughput when there are transient/random networking issues.	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.	none
profile	AWS profile name to use.	default
workers	The number of workers to perform flush operations for this output.	1

Get started

To send records into Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, you can run the plugin from the command line or through the configuration file.

Command line

The Firehose plugin can read the parameters from the command line through the -p argument (property).

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

Configuration file

In your main configuration file append the following:

fluent-bit.yaml

pipeline:

  outputs:
    - name: kinesis_firehose
      match: '*'
      region: us-east-1
      delivery_stream: my-stream

fluent-bit.conf

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

Permissions

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

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

Worker support

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

Example:

fluent-bit.yaml

pipeline:

  outputs:
    - name: kinesis_firehose
      match: '*'
      region: us-east-1
      delivery_stream: my-stream
      workers: 2

fluent-bit.conf

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

If you enable a single worker, you are enabling a dedicated thread for your Firehose output. Fluent Bit recommends 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

Fluent Bit 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 Fluent Bit 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 repository.