How to Prevent Fluent Bit's Tail Input from Missing Log Lines

Better Stack Team
Updated on August 11, 2024

If Fluent Bit's tail input only captures the initial lines of your log files and does not capture subsequent entries until a restart, the problem is likely due to how file changes are being monitored.

To resolve this, enable the Inotify_Watcher option. This tells Fluent Bit to leverage Linux's notify mechanism to detect file changes in real time.

Here's how to configure it:

/etc/fluent-bit/fluent-bit.conf
[INPUT]
    Name          tail
    Path          /var/log/myapp/*.log
    Tag           myapp.*
    Inotify_Watcher On

[OUTPUT]
    Name          stdout
    Match         myapp.*

When you enable the Inotify_Watcher, Fluent Bit will immediately capture every new log line as it's written, even during file rotations, without needing continuous polling.