tbtail

tbtail is Tinybird's agent for ingesting log file data into Tinybird and making it available for exploration. Currently, it ingests all data into a string column of your data source. You'll have to extract each field, using JSONExtract function. You have detailed information about how you can do it in this blog post.

tbtail is based on clicktail tool see here.

Supported Parsers

Unless our base tool clicktail supports several parsers, tbtail has only been tested with Nginx. Feel free to use other parsers if you feel confident enough.

The complete list of parsers can be found in the parsers/ directory, but as of this writing there are:

• ArangoDB
• MongoDB
• MySQL
• PostgreSQL
• nginx
• regex
• mysqlaudit

Installation

There are three installation options for tbtail:

• From source code
• From downloaded deb package

• Fron downloaded bin package

Install from source code

1. Clone the tbtail and libtb-go repo.
2. Compile both using go build, go install, or create your makefile.

First of all, remember you should set your GOPATH var pointing to your go project folder.

Use go 1.14. It is not compatible with higher versions.

go get github.com/tinybirdco/tbtail

GOPATH=<go-project-folder> go build
GOPATH=<go-project-folder> go install

The binary will be installed into your bin folder $GOPATH/bin/tbtail

If you need to change anything highly probably you will need our tblib-go tool too.

go get github.com/tinybirdco/libtb-go

GOPATH=<go-project-folder> go build
GOPATH=<go-project-folder> go install

You can also use our Makefile to build, clean, install, and packaging the code.

• Use make clean to clean the project
• Use make build to build tbtail
• Use make build-all to build tbtail and lib-tb
• Use make install to install tbtail
• Use make package to build the .deb package

Remember that, in all cases, you need GOPATH to point to your root workspace.

Releasing a new version

Everytime you create a new version remeber you need to bump the version in version.txt. It is important because the binary file, and the package file will contain the version you have generated.

Add all the changes to the changelog including the link to the binary file with the changes.

Do not forget to tag the code with the released version.

Install from deb package

Download our latest package from here.

Install the package as follows:

sudo dpkg -i tbtail_1.0.0_amd64.deb

After installing it you'll have:

• The binary file in /usr/local/bin/tbtail
• The configuration file in /etc/tbtail/tbtail.conf
• The service file in /lib/systemd/system/tbtail.service

You have detailed information about how to use the tool here.

Install from bin package

Download our latest package from here.

You can place the binary file where you want and run it using the command line or a configuration file as explained in Usage.

Usage

Make sure you have created the data source in Tinybird that logs will be appended to. You can use the nginx_raw.datasource file:

tb push datasource schema/tinybird/nginx_raw.datasource
tb push datasource schema/tinybird/nginx_log.datasource
tb push datasource schema/tinybird/nginx_mv.pipe

For a complete data project that will store the logs and materialize it with several granularity levels, you can check out this project.

Once the Data Source is prepared to receive logs, you can run the binary as follows:

TB_WRITE_API_KEY=p.ey.. # token with either DATASOURCES:APPEND:nginx_raw, DATASOURCES:CREATE or ADMIN scope
tbtail --dataset nginx_raw --parser nginx --file /var/log/nginx/access.log --nginx.conf /etc/nginx/nginx.conf --nginx.format combined --writekey $TB_WRITE_API_KEY

You can also run the binary using a config file like tbtail.conf. This file contains a description for each available option.

If you have installed our package you can manage the service using systemctl command:

sudo systemctl start tbtail
sudo systemctl stop tbtail
sudo systemctl restart tbtail
systemctl status tbtail

Development

Make sure you have go 1.14. It is not compatible with higher versions.