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

I think it's usually ill-advised to log directly to Elasticsearch from a Log4j/Logback/whatever appender, but I agree that writing Logstash filters to parse a "normal" human-readable Java log is a bad idea too. I use https://github.com/logstash/log4j-jsonevent-layout everywhere I can to have Log4j's regular file appenders produce JSON logs that don't require any further parsing by Logstash.