Deprecation Note

We published the last version of Graylog Documentation before the release of Graylog 4.2. Now, all documentation and help content for Graylog products are available at https://docs.graylog.org/.

There will be no further updates to these pages as of October 2021.

Do you have questions about our documentation? You may place comments or start discussions about documentation here: https://community.graylog.org/c/documentation-campfire/30

SLES installation

This guide describes the fastest way to install Graylog on SLES 12 SP3. All links and packages are present at the time of writing but might need to be updated later on.

Warning

This guide does not cover security settings! The server administrator must make sure the graylog server is not publicly exposed, and is following standard security best practices.

Prerequisites

The following patterns are required for a minimal setup (see SLES 12 SP3 Deployment Guide):

- Base System
- Minimal System (Appliances)
- YaST configuration packages

Warning

This Guide assumes that the firewall is disabled and communication is possible to the outside world.

Assuming a minimal setup, you have to install the Java runtime environment:

$ sudo zypper install java-1_8_0-openjdk

MongoDB

Installing MongoDB on SLES should follow the tutorial for SLES from the MongoDB documentation. Add the GPG key and the repository before installing MongoDB:

$ sudo rpm --import https://www.mongodb.org/static/pgp/server-4.0.asc
$ sudo zypper addrepo --gpgcheck "https://repo.mongodb.org/zypper/suse/12/mongodb-org/4.0/x86_64/" mongodb
$ sudo zypper -n install mongodb-org

In order to automatically start MongoDB on system boot, you have to activate the MongoDB service by running the following commands:

$ sudo chkconfig mongod on
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl restart mongod.service

Elasticsearch

Graylog can be used with Elasticsearch 6.x, please follow the installation instructions from the Elasticsearch installation guide.

First install the Elastic GPG key with rpm --import https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch then add the repository file /etc/zypp/repos.d/elasticsearch.repo with the following contents:

[elasticsearch-6.x]
name=Elasticsearch repository for 6.x packages
baseurl=https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/oss-6.x/yum
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch
enabled=1
autorefresh=1
type=rpm-md

followed by the installation of the latest release with sudo zypper install elasticsearch-oss.

Make sure to modify the Elasticsearch configuration file (/etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml) and set the cluster name to graylog additionally you need to uncomment (remove the # as first character) the line, and add action.auto_create_index: false to the configuration file:

cluster.name: graylog
action.auto_create_index: false

In order to automatically start Elasticsearch on system boot, you have to activate the Elasticsearch service by running the following commands:

$ sudo chkconfig elasticsearch on
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl restart elasticsearch.service

Graylog

First install the Graylog GPG Key with rpm --import https://packages.graylog2.org/repo/debian/keyring.gpg then add the repository file /etc/zypp/repos.d/graylog.repo with the following content:

[graylog]
name=graylog
baseurl=https://packages.graylog2.org/repo/el/stable/3.2/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-graylog

After that, install the latest release with sudo zypper install graylog-server.

Hint

If you want the Integrations Plugins or the Enterprise Plugins installed, you need to install them now. The following install all official provided packages by Graylog at the same time: sudo zypper install graylog-server graylog-enterprise-plugins graylog-integrations-plugins graylog-enterprise-integrations-plugins

Make sure to follow the instructions in your /etc/graylog/server/server.conf and add password_secret and root_password_sha2. These settings are mandatory and without them, Graylog will not start!

You can use the following command to create your password_secret:

cat /dev/urandom | base64 | cut -c1-96 | head -1

You need to use the following command to create your root_password_sha2:

echo -n "Enter Password: " && head -1 </dev/stdin | tr -d '\n' | sha256sum | cut -d" " -f1

To be able to connect to Graylog you should set http_bind_address to the public host name or a public IP address of the machine you can connect to. More information about these settings can be found in Configuring the web interface.

Note

If you’re operating a single-node setup and would like to use HTTPS for the Graylog web interface and the Graylog REST API, it’s possible to use NGINX or Apache as a reverse proxy.

The last step is to enable Graylog during the operating system’s startup:

$ sudo chkconfig graylog-server on
$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl start graylog-server.service

The next step is to ingest messages into your new Graylog Cluster and extract the messages with extractors or use the Pipelines to work with the messages.

Cluster Setup

If you plan to have multiple servers assuming different roles in your cluster like we have in this big production setup you need to modify only a few settings. This is covered in our Multi-node Setup guide. The default file location guide lists the locations of the files you need to modify.