Install Fluent Bit on Ubuntu 24.04

Fluent Bit is a lightweight and efficient data processor and forwarder for logs, metrics, and traces. It’s widely used to aggregate and ship data to various endpoints like Elasticsearch, OpenObserve, and many others.

This tutorial demonstrates how to install Fluent Bit on Ubuntu 24.04.

Install Fluent Bit

Download the GPG key and add it to the specified directory:

sudo wget -qO /etc/apt/keyrings/fluentbit.asc https://packages.fluentbit.io/fluentbit.key

Add the Fluent Bit repository:

echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/fluentbit.asc] https://packages.fluentbit.io/ubuntu/$(lsb_release -sc) $(lsb_release -sc) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fluentbit.list

Update the package lists and install Fluent Bit:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install -y fluent-bit

Start Fluent Bit service:

sudo service fluent-bit start

Run the following command to enable Fluent Bit to start automatically on boot:

sudo systemctl enable fluent-bit

We can check the Fluent Bit version using the following command:

/opt/fluent-bit/bin/fluent-bit --version

Use the following command to check if the Fluent Bit service is running:

sudo service fluent-bit status

Additionally, we can stop or restart the Fluent Bit service:

sudo service fluent-bit stop

sudo service fluent-bit restart

Testing Fluent Bit

By default, Fluent Bit is configured to collect CPU usage metrics and send the records to the standard output (stdout). We can view the output data using the journalctl command:

journalctl -u fluent-bit -f

Uninstall Fluent Bit

Disable Fluent Bit service:

sudo systemctl disable fluent-bit

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

sudo systemctl reset-failed

Remove Fluent Bit and related dependencies:

sudo apt purge --autoremove -y fluent-bit

Remove GPG key and repository:

sudo rm -rf /etc/apt/keyrings/fluentbit.asc

sudo rm -rf /etc/apt/sources.list.d/fluentbit.list