Logging from Java app to ELK without need for parsing logs

Question

I want to send logs from a Java app to ElasticSearch, and the conventional approach seems to be to set up Logstash on the server running the app, and have logstash parse the

Answer 1

If you need a quick solution I've written this appender here Log4J2 Elastic REST Appender if you want to use it. It has the ability to buffer log events based on time and/or number of events before sending it to Elastic (using the _bulk API so that it sends it all in one go). It has been published to Maven Central so it's pretty straight forward.

As the other folks have already mentioned the best way to do it would be to save it to file, and then ship it to ES separately. However I think that there is value if you need to get something running quickly until you have time/resources implement the optimal way.