1 Introduction to Fluent Bit

Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice in Wonderland that you should “begin at the beginning,” so that’s what we’ll do in this chapter. Before we get down to the details, let’s take a moment to understand what Fluent Bit is and answer some important questions about it, such as why it is so important and worthy of a book and how it fits into the IT ecosystem. We’ll also address the elephant in the room: the relationship between Fluentd and Fluent Bit.

1.1 Why is Fluent Bit so important?

Fluent Bit is, at its heart, a specialized event capture and distribution tool. Let’s break that statement down a bit. Why is it specialized? Fluent Bit focuses on log events, metrics, and traces (sometimes called signals):

1.1.1 The value of event distribution

1.1.2 Fluent’s place in CNCF

1.2 Core Fluent Bit concepts

1.2.1 Payload structure

1.2.2 Logical architecture

1.3 Drivers of Fluent Bit adoption

1.3.1 Small footprint, efficiency, and speed

1.3.2 Effect of OpenTelemetry and how Fluent Bit relates to It

1.3.3 Extending Fluent Bit with C, Go, WebAssembly, and Lua

1.3.4 Fluent Bit and stream processing

1.3.5 OTel vs. Fluent Bit and Fluentd

1.4 Is Fluent Bit a child or a successor of Fluentd?

1.5 How we’re going to discover Fluent Bit

1.5.1 How much Kubernetes will this book involve?

1.5.2 Logging in Action

Summary