Tail

The plugin reads every matched file in the Path pattern and for every new line found (separated by a \n), it generates a new record. Optionally a database file can be used so the plugin can have a history of tracked files and a state of offsets, this is very useful to resume a state if the service is restarted.

The plugin supports the following configuration parameters:

Note that if the database parameter db is not specified, by default the plugin will start reading each target file from the beginning.

Docker mode exists to recombine JSON log lines split by the Docker daemon due to its line length limit. To use this feature, configure the tail plugin with the corresponding parser and then enable Docker mode:

In order to tail text or log files, you can run the plugin from the command line or through the configuration file:

From the command line you can let Fluent Bit parse text files with the following options:

The tail input plugin a feature to save the state of the tracked files, is strongly suggested you enabled this. For this purpose the db property is available, e.g:

When running, the database file /path/to/logs.db will be created, this database is backed by SQLite3 so if you are interested into explore the content, you can open it with the SQLite client tool, e.g:

Formatting SQLite

Files rotation are properly handled, including logrotate copytruncate mode.