Exploring Output Plugins

The output plugin is used to send data to a destination. It acts as the final section required in the Logstash configuration file. Some of the most used output plugins are as follows.

stdout

This is a fairly simple plugin, which outputs the data to the standard output of the shell. It is useful for debugging the configurations used for the plugins. This is mostly used to validate whether Logstash is parsing the input and applying filters (if any) properly to provide output as required.

The basic configuration for stdout is as follows:

stdout { 
} 

In this plugin, no settings are mandatory. The additional configuration settings are as follows:

• codec: This is used to encode the data before sending it as an output. You can use codec as JSON to display the output data in JSON format, or use codec as rubydebug to display the output data using the Ruby Awesome Print library.

• workers: This is used to define the number of threads that will process the packets for output...