Fluent bit v3.2: Faster, Lighter Telemetry Agent & Processor

SALT LAKE CITY, UT – November 12, 2024—At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, the Fluent community announced Fluent Bit v3.2, delivering better performance, increased efficiency, and new capabilities with OpenTelemetry (OTel), YAML, and eBPF.  Fluent Bit is a CNCF-graduated project under the umbrella of Fluentd, alongside other foundational technologies such as Kubernetes and Prometheus. Fluent Bit hit 1 billion downloads in 2022 and has since exploded to surpass 15 billion downloads in the last year.

Fluent Bit v3.2 highlights its continued focus on performance and extensibility.  It delivers new capabilities enabling users to seamlessly collect and manage skyrocketing data volumes and diverse data types, including support for new signals. The v3.2 release builds on Fluent Bit’s foundation as a universal telemetry agent with key new capabilities:

Performance Improvements upon industry-leading speed:

• Updated JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) encoder with Single Instruction Multi Data (SIMD) support provides improvements for intensive workloads. Recent benchmarks have shown up to a 30% decrease in CPU, a 15% decrease in memory usage, and a 15% decrease in energy consumption. SIMD support for log processing and parsing comes out of the box, providing users with immediate performance benefits without any additional work.
• The new capabilities in v3.2 build on Fluent Bit’s core with continued default multi-threading for inputs, outputs, and processing of multiple observability signal types – logs, metrics and traces

More signal type support with Blob & eBPF: 

• With v3.2, Fluent Bit expands beyond telemetry data. Now, users can collect and move massive files, including photos and videos, to storage destinations such as Azure Blob. This has specific applications for IoT and AI use cases, where videos and photos are leveraged to assist training AI models. 
• Provides support for Extended Berkeley Packet Filter (eBPF), unlocking security, and advanced observability use cases. It introduces out-of-the-box eBPF capabilities and allows users to plug in their own eBPF programs. It also includes new integrations that allow users to plug in other CNCF eBPF projects, such as Falco and Tracee, for security use cases.

Increased Compatibility (OTel and YAML)

• The Fluent Bit agent can now collect data and leverage the OTel Envelope processor to convert the logs to the correct format for any OTel backend. With OTel becoming the de-facto protocol standard for observability, Fluent Bit continues its integration and standardization with increased compatibility across Logs, Metrics, and Traces. 
• Now, v3.2 includes full support for YAML–the standard for Kubernetes configuration—in every part of the Fluent Bit pipeline: parsers, configuration, processors, and settings. This allows a single unified configuration language across both Fluent Bit and Kubernetes resources.

“While Fluent Bit throughput and resource usage are already best in class, v3.2 introduces massive performance upgrades, new ecosystem integrations, and signal support. From the beginning, Fluent Bit was built to integrate with best-in-class technologies, open source standards, and with a commitment to vendor neutrality. It enables users to build the best tech stack for them,”  said Eduardo Silva Pereira, original creator of Fluent Bit and Engineering Manager at Chronosphere. “Fluent Bit v3.2 brings us close to delivering upon that vision.”

For more information about Fluent Bit v3.2, visit https://chronosphere.io/learn/fluent-bit-v3-2/.

Fluent Bit is a CNCF-graduated project under the umbrella of Fluentd, alongside other foundational technologies such as Kubernetes and Prometheus. It was originally created to be a lighter-weight version of Fluentd for collecting and forwarding logs from embedded Linux devices and containers where deploying Fluentd would be impractical or even impossible due to limited system resources.

It has since evolved and is now capable of collecting logs, metrics, and traces, processing them in mid-stream, and routing them to any number of backends. Today, Fluent Bit is embedded in major Kubernetes distributions, including those from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

To learn more, visit https://fluentbit.io/ or join our Slack community.

Media Contact 

Escalate PR for Chronosphere 

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