Getting Started

Basic Concepts

This section is about providing clarity on the concepts used in BindPlane, and how to use them to setup log monitoring for your cloud and on premise environments.

Agent
An Agent is the BindPlane software that installs in your environment and captures logs. This software typically will be installed on the system the log files exist. It can also be configured to receive logs from other systems through protocols like Syslog.

Source
A configuration that specifies which and what type of logs to collect and how to parse them, this configuration can be deployed on many agents.

Destination
A Destination is the configuration used to send the collected log data to. This data is sent directly from the agent to the destination.

Template
A Template is a set of configured Sources and a Destination. This is a list that can be used to install an Agent with sources and destinations that are already configured.

BindPlane Log monitoring configuration is fairly flexible to fit your specific configuration and deployment needs. We do recommend when setting up your first Agent you follow the steps of installing an agent, then configuring a Source and Destination for that agent. Once you have some familiarity we recommend leveraging templates as they provide more powerful deployment features useful for Infrastructure as Code and cluster environments like Kubernetes.