General Windows development

[fujimotos]

This is the ticket to keep track of the current Windows development.

As of writing, we are in Fluent Bit v1.7.0 development phase.

Planned Tasks

• Add support for filesystem storage on Windows #1694 Add support for filesystem storage on Windows
• parser: support subsecond resolution with colon (%s:%L) #2210 support subsecond resolution with colon (%s:%L)
• The time format in the syslog-rfc5424 parser is incorrect (flb_strptime) #2625 Support syslog-rfc5424 format in flb_strptime

Memo

• The current biggest task is Add support for filesystem storage on Windows #1694, which adds "file chunk" support
  to Windows (requested in Windows Development for Fluent Bit v1.6.0 #2351).

• The file chunk support should also enable us to use S3 plugin on
  Windows as discussed in aws: port Amazon S3 plugin to Windows #2632.

• The previous ticket was Add Windows Support to Fluent Bit #960 (very long) and Windows Development for Fluent Bit v1.6.0 #2351.

[nweseloh]

It is not exactly a "windows-only" issue, but we have a Windows container setup and would love to use Loki with Grafana cloud.
fluent-bit is the only reasonable choice for a log collector agent due to it's great windows support. Promtail is no alternative as it does not support Windows at all.

But unfortunately, the loki output plugin does not support HTTPs & Basic Auth yet, so we have no way at all to use the Grafana cloud-hosted Loki on Windows right now, see #2735. A fix for that would be greatly appreciated by your windows users.

[fujimotos]

But unfortunately, the loki output plugin does not support HTTPs & Basic Auth yet, so we have no way at all to use the Grafana cloud-hosted Loki on Windows right now, see #2735. A fix for that would be greatly appreciated by your windows users.

@nweseloh Hm. So you want Loki plugin to have TLS (and Basic Auth) support
so that it can connect to cloud hosting instance.

Can you submit a new issue ticket (regarding the HTTPS support part, which is
a separate issue than Auth support) for that task so that we can follow up?

[nweseloh]

Sure, I added a feature request in #2791. Thanks for looking into this!

[fujimotos]

Fluent Bit v1.7 was released last month.

https://fluentbit.io/announcements/v1.7.0/

The major Windows-related topics were:

1. New filesystem chunk support (presitent log buffer in disk)
2. Port out_s3 to Windows
3. Port filter_geoip2 to Windows

Overall, "filesystem chunk support" was landed as planned, and
I observe some users already make use of the feature.

Some additional notes:

• There was a bug in the official binary builds of v1.7.x that inadvertently
  depends on OpenSSL DLLs.
• This is already fixed in HEAD by Getting [error] [flb_msgpack_to_gelf] level is 'WARN', but should be in 0..7 or a syslog keyword #3149 and the fix should be included in v1.7.3.

[fujimotos]

To Windows users: I started to work on the development for v1.8 series.
Overall, I'm thinking to work on the following tasks:

1. Port HTTP monitoring feature to Windows. Official Windows build for 1.6.1 does not support built-in HTTP server #2696
2. Port out_kafka to Windows.
3. Add stacktrace mechanism.
4. Add Arrow support to out_s3 (all platforms) out_s3: add Apache Arrow support #3184

Also I keep the Windows subsystem-related planning in my development tree..
Feel free to reply to me in this thread if you have any suggestions or requests.

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[joefreyk]

Good day.

The documentation for the Windows agent doesn't discuss a silent installation method. After trying all of the standard switches "/?", "/q", "/qn", "/s", etc I found the switches for Nullsoft installers are "/S" and "/D". It would probably be useful to have these in the docs.

Thank you to all who create this software.