> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.honeycomb.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Forward Fluentd Data

> Forward structured logs from Fluentd to Honeycomb using Fluentd's out_http plugin or the OpenTelemetry Collector for richer telemetry context.

[Fluentd](https://www.fluentd.org/) is a widely-used data router.
If you are using Fluentd to aggregate structured logs, Fluentd's [`out_http` plugin](https://docs.fluentd.org/output/http) makes it easy to forward data to Honeycomb.

<Tip>
  If your system uses logspout as a log router for Docker containers, you can send logs to Honeycomb with one of the [logspout third-party modules](https://github.com/gliderlabs/logspout#third-party-modules) that integrates with [logstash](/integrations/logs/logstash/) or [fluentd](/integrations/logs/fluentd/).
</Tip>

## Getting Started

To set up the plugin, first grab your team API key from your [Honeycomb account page](https://ui.honeycomb.io/account), and then update your Fluentd configuration file (usually found in `/etc/fluentd/fluentd.conf` or `/etc/td-agent/td-agent.conf`).
A basic configuration to forward events with the `my.logs` tag to the Honeycomb dataset `fluentd_dataset` looks like this:

```xml theme={}
<filter my.logs>
  @type record_transformer
  enable_ruby true
  renew_record true
  <record>
    data ${ record }
    time ${ time.iso8601() }
  </record>
</filter>

<match my.logs>
  @type http
  endpoint https://api.honeycomb.io/1/batch/fluentd_dataset <!--US instance-->
  <!--endpoint https://api.eu1.honeycomb.io/1/batch/fluentd_dataset--><!--EU instance-->
  headers {"X-Honeycomb-Team":"YOUR_API_KEY"}
  <format>
    @type json
  </format>
  json_array true
  <buffer>
    flush_interval 2s
  </buffer>
</match>
```

## Set Event Timestamps

In Fluentd, each event has a distinguished `time` attribute.
In general, you will use a [parser plugin](https://docs.fluentd.org/parser) to extract the time attribute from log lines.
You can read more about the structure of a Fluentd event [here](https://docs.fluentd.org/quickstart/life-of-a-fluentd-event#event-structure).

For example, if you have a JSON log file containing timestamps in the format:

```json theme={}
{"timestamp": "2018-02-04T14:55:10Z", "host": "app22", ...}
```

Then, you would extract the time value using the following Fluentd configuration:

```xml theme={}
<source>
  @type tail
  path /var/log/my.logs
  <parse>
    @json # Use the JSON parser plugin to parse records
    time_key timestamp # Extract the time value from the `timestamp` key
    time_type string # Expect a string timestamp
    time_format %Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ # Specify the timestamp format
  </parse>
  tag my.logs
</source>

<filter my.logs>
  @type record_transformer
  enable_ruby true
  renew_record true
  <record>
    data ${ record }
    time ${ time.iso8601() }
  </record>
</filter>

<match my.logs>
  @type http
  endpoint https://api.honeycomb.io/1/batch/myapp_dataset <!--US instance-->
  <!--endpoint https://api.eu1.honeycomb.io/1/batch/myapp_dataset--><!--EU instance-->
  headers {"X-Honeycomb-Team":"YOUR_API_KEY"}
  <format>
    @type json
  </format>
  json_array true
  <buffer>
    flush_interval 2s
  </buffer>
</match>
```