fine_tune_integration.md

Fine-tune the integration

Motivation

Most of migration work has been done by the import-beats script, but there're tasks that require developer's interaction.

It may happen that your integration misses a screenshot or an icon, it's a good moment to add missing resources to Beats/Kibana repositories and re-import the integration (idempotent).

Checklist

The order of action items on the checklist is advised to prevent the contributor from repeating some actions (fixing what's been already fixed, as the script has overridden part of it).

1. Add icon if missing.

   The integration icons are presented in different places in Kibana, hence it's better to define custom icons to make the UI easier to navigate.

   As the import-beats script looks for icons in Kibana and EUI repositories, add an icon to the first one the same way as for tutorial resources (Kibana directory: src/legacy/core_plugins/kibana/public/home/tutorial_resources/logos/).

2. Add screenshot if missing.

   The Kibana Integration Manager shows screenshots related with the integration. Screenshots present Kibana dashboards visualizing the metric/log data.

   The import-beats script finds references to screenshots mentioned in _meta/docs.asciidoc and copies image files from the Beats directories:

   • metricbeat/docs/images
   • filebeat/docs/images

3. Improve/correct spelling product names.

   The correct spelling of product names simply makes better impression. The import-beats scripts uses the fields.yml file as the source of the correct spelling (title property), e.g. Mysql - MySQL, Nginx - NGINX, Aws - AWS.

   Keep in mind that this step requires reimporting package contents.

4. Write README template file for the integration.

   The README template is used to render the final README file including exported fields. The template should be placed in the package/<integration-name>/_dev/build/docs/README.md. If the directory doesn't exist, please create it.

   Review the MySQL docs template to see how to use template functions (e.g. {{fields "data-stream-name"}}). If the same data stream name is used in both metrics and logs, please add -metrics and -logs in the template. For example, elb is a data stream for log and also a data stream for metrics. In README.md template, {{fields "elb_logs"}} and {{fields "elb_metrics"}} are used to separate them.

5. Review fields file and exported fields in docs.

   The goal of this action item is to verify if produced artifacts are correct.

   The fields files (package-fields.yml, fields.yml and ecs.yml) in the package were created from original fields.yml files (that may contain ECS schema fields) and fields.epr.yml (defining some other fields used in the ingest pipeline). It may happen that original sources have a typo, bad description or misses a field definition. The sum of fields in all present files should contain only fields that are really used, e.g. not all existing ECS fields.

   It may happen that the ingest pipeline uses fields abstracted from ECS, but not mentioned in fields.yml. Integrations should contain these fields and also have them documented.

   The fields for an integration package are divided into the following three files:

   • ecs.yml: ECS compliant fields that are used by this particular data stream.
   • package-fields.yml: Package level fields that are used by this particular data stream, which does not exist under <integration-package-name>.<data-stream-name>.
   • fields.yml: Dataset level fields that are specific to this particular data stream, and non ECS compliant.

   See the PR elastic/beats#17895 to understand how to add them to Beats (e.g. event.code, event.provider) using the fields.epr.yml file.

6. Metricbeat: add missing configuration options.

   The import-beats script extracts configuration options from Metricbeat module's _meta directory. It analyzes the configuration files and selects options based on enabled metricsets (not commented). If you notice that some configuration options are missing in your package's manifest files, simply create the config.epr.yml file with all required options.

   Sample PR: elastic/beats#17323

7. Review titles and descriptions in manifest files.

   Titles and descriptions are fields visualized in the Kibana UI. Most users will use them to see how to configure the integration with their installation of a product or to how to use advanced configuration options.

8. Compact configuration options (vars).

   Currently, all configuration options are set by the import-beats script on the stream level (path: data stream/<data-stream-name>/manifest.yml).

   It may happen that some of them in different data streams are simply duplicates or concern the same setting, which will be always equal (e.g. MySQL username, password). Keep in mind that two data streams may have the same configuration option, but different values (e.g. period, paths), hence can't be compacted.

   To sum up, compacting takes down from the user the necessity to setup the same configuration option few times (one per data stream).

9. Define all variable properties.

   The variable properties customize visualization of configuration options in the Kibana UI. Make sure they're defined in all manifest files.

    vars:
      - name: paths
        required: true
        show_user: true
        title: Access log paths
        description: Paths to the nginx access log file.
        type: text
        multi: true
        default:
          - /var/log/nginx/access.log*

required - option is required

show_user - don't hide the configuration option (collapsed menu)

title - human readable variable name

description - variable description (may contain some details)

type - field type (according to the reference: text, password, bool, integer)

multi - the field has mutliple values.

10. Review stream configuration.

    Due to changed templating engine from a standard Golang one to handlebars, it may be hard to automatically convert the Filebeat input configuration (nested variables, many representations, conditions, loops). Kindly please to review the output stream configuration and review potential bugs.

11. Update docs template with sample events.

    The events collected by the agent slightly differ from original, Metricbeat's and Filebeat's, ones. Adjust the event content manually basing on already migrated integrations (e.g. MySQL integration) or copy them once managed to run whole setup with real agent.

12. Kibana: use stream.data stream field instead of event.data stream.

    Using stream.data stream instead of event.data stream also makes queries a lot more efficient as this is a constant_keyword. Make sure that dashboards in your package don't use the event.data stream field. If so, simply replace them with the more efficient one.