How to install ElastAlert with Elasticsearch on Ubuntu

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If you have to manage huge amounts of data then you will find yourself one day wishing for a tool that would simply point out the anomalies or inconsistencies in the data and alert you in real time.

What is ElastAlert?

ElastAlert is designed to exactly do that. It is a simple framework that alerts when it detects anomalies, spikes, or other patterns of rules from data added in the Elasticsearch.

For example, you could be setting up a ‘frequency’ alert, which will notify you when there is X number of events in Y time.

Or you may want to be immediately warned when there is a ‘spike’ event, that is when the rate at which an event occurs suddenly increases or decreases.

Other rules types that are included are:

• ‘flatline’ – when there are less than X events in Y time
• ‘blacklist/whitelist’ – when a certain field matches ‘blacklist’ or ‘whitelist’
• ‘any’ – when an event that matches a given filter happens
• ‘change’ – when a field has two different values within a specified period of time

Supported Alert Types

Currently, ElastAlert has built-in support for the following alert types.

• Command
• Email
• JIRA
• OpsGenie
• SNS
• HipChat
• Slack
• Telegram
• GoogleChat
• Debug
• Stomp
• theHive

Install ElastAlert with Elasticsearch on Ubuntu

In this article, we show you how to install ElastAlert on ubuntu 18.04.

Requirements

• Elasticsearch
• ISO8601 or Unix timestamped data
• Python 2.7
• pip, see requirements.txt – (https://github.com/Yelp/elastalert/blob/master/requirements.txt)
• Packages for ubuntu –  python-pip python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev

Installing Prerequisites

Install Python 2.7:

sudo apt-get install python-minimal

Check the Python version:

sudo python --version

Then you will get output for python 2.7.

Install needed packages:

sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev

There are few different ways to install ElastAlert and here we are going to do the installation by cloning git repository.

So we need to install “git” before proceeding. Usually, Ubuntu 18.04 has git already installed.

Check for the installed or available version of git:

sudo apt-cache policy git

This will give the details of the installed and candidate git versions.

If you can’t see installed git version, run following command.

sudo apt-get install git

We are going to clone ElastAlert repository to “/opt” folder, therefore change directory.

sudo cd /opt

Now clone a git repository.

sudo git clone https://github.com/Yelp/elastalert.git

Now install modules.

sudo pip install "setuptools>=11.3"

sudo python setup.py install

You may get an error like this.

Then run below command to install “PyOpenSSL”

sudo pip install PyOpenSSL

Here we are going to integrate with Elastic search 6.x. So Elasticsearch 5.0+ will be installed here.

sudo pip install "elasticsearch>=5.0.0"

Configure ElastAlert

We cloned ElastAlert repo to “/opt”directory, so change directory before continuing.

sudo cd /opt/elastalert/

Now we get a copy of config.yaml.example file as a config.yaml

sudo cp config.yaml.example config.yaml

Modify config.yaml file.

vim config.yaml

Uncomment the following lines and modify.

ElasticSearch Hostname or IP

es_host: elk-server

ElasticServer port

es_port: 9200

Uncomment basic-authentication:

es_username: 
es_password:

Save and close the file.

Create ElastAlert index.

sudo elastalert-create-index

Creating a Rule

Now edit the file titled “example_frequency.yaml” inside the “/opt/elastalert/example_rules/” folder

sudo vim example_rules/example_frequency.yaml

Uncomment and modify index as follows:

index: filebeat-*

Now define a filter for an alert. Here we filter keywords with the string “exception”.

filter:
- query_string:
    query: "message:*exception*"

Configure Alter with Slack. Here you need to create a Slack channel and incoming webhook. Then add configuration details as follows.

alert:
 - "slack"
slack:
slack_webhook_url: "https://hooks.slack.com/services/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"
slack_username_override: "Fosslinux-Elastic-Bot"
slack_channel_override: "#fosslinuxalert"
slack_emoji_override: ":robot_face:"
slack_msg_color: "danger"

You can follow below steps to create Slack channel.

Configuring Slack channel for ElastAlert

If you don’t have a slack account, you can get one by simply signing up. Go to “slack.com” and enter your email address and click “GET STARTED”.

Then click ‘create new workspace’ and verify your email address. Now you can log in and view the dashboard.

Go to Browse apps -> Custom Integrations -> Incoming Webhooks -> New Configuration

Then click on  ‘Create new channel’ to create a channel for send Alerts.

Then click the ‘Create Channel’ button and you will be taken to the Webhook integration page.

Click ‘Add Incoming WebHooks Integration’ button. This will create integration settings.

Test Rule

Change Directory to ElastAlert.

sudo cd /opt/elastalert/

Run below command to test configured rule.

sudo elastalert-test-rule example_rules/example_frequency.yaml

Run ElastAlert

We will start ElastAlert as a background service. This command should be run inside “/opt/elastalert/” folder.

sudo python -m elastalert.elastalert --verbose --rule example_frequency.yaml &

Now ElastAlert will begin to check queries on Elasticsearch (On ELK server). If there is a match it will shoot alert to Slack.

Alert triggered.

Alert will go to Slack Channel.

That’s it, we successfully installed and configured ElastAlert with the elastic search, and also set up alerts to Slack. We hope this exhaustive tutorial will help you to install ElastAlert and set up some rules to trigger alerts easily. Questions and feedback are welcome in the comments section.