Heka v0.5 Released

The last few months have been bustling here in Heka-land. Our community of users and contributors has been growing steadily, and real world use is paying off in feedback and pull requests. Those of us who have been working full time on Heka are taking turns instead working with Heka, deploying it and actually using it to solve operational problems. Our experiences have helped us to understand the rough edges, and to be excited about how useful Heka has already become. It’s also given us great ideas about improving usability, some of which we’ve already implemented.

It’s our pleasure to announce the release of Heka v0.5. This is a significant release, full of so many goodies that they won’t all fit into a single announcement. Expect to see additional posts on some of the new features soon. Here are some highlights (full details are available in the changelog):

  • The new LogstreamerInput allows you to specify any layout, ordering, and rotation scheme for your log files. It will read the files in order, keeping track of its location in the data stream, even through restarts and/or file rotations.
  • We’ve made major improvements to the Lua environment we expose for real time data processing and graphing. Our work building Lua filters for internal customers allowed us to start abstracting out some of the more common tasks that need to happen, and some of these we’ve put into modules available for use in every Heka SandboxFilter.
  • Among these Lua modules are our rsyslog and nginx decoder modules. Setting them up is easy: copy the log format configuration string from the other server’s config file and paste it into your Heka config file. Then wire your decoder up to a LogstreamerInput to read those server’s files from the filesystem (or one of UdpInput, TcpInput, AMQPInput, etc. to handle a stream over the network).
  • We’ve added the ProcessDirectoryInput, which manages a set of processes to be run at specified intervals, generating Heka messages from their output. You can add, remove, or change any of the data collectors without needing to restart or reconfigure Heka itself.
  • The Heka -> Heka TCP transport story is much improved. The TcpOutput now supports reconnecting with exponential back-off, along with queuing to disk to prevent data loss during connection drops. We’ve also added TLS support with full client cert authentication to the TcpInput; the TcpOutput; and the heka-flood, heka-sbmgr, and heka-sbmgrload command line tools.

Release packages for Linux and OSX are available on github. As always, we’d love to hear from you on the Heka mailing list, or in the #heka channel on irc.mozilla.org, or (by popular demand) in the new #heka channel on irc.freenode.net.

1 response

  1. Christian Vozar wrote on :

    Fantastic.