Flowcollector not sending data to HTTP output

ElastiFlow Community
1

Hi, I’m trying to make the flow collector send/push data output to an HTTP endpoint, as per documented HTTP OUTPUT. Problem is, it doesn’t seem to ever send anything.

Checking with tcpdump on the remote server, flowcollector just doesn’t send anything, ever. Using EF_OUTPUT_STDOUT, I can see the flowcollector does get data input and outputs it correctly to itself. It just doesn’t send it through the configured HTTP_OUTPUT, as set below:

EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_ADDRESSES: my-remote-server.com:9094
EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_ALLOWED_RECORD_TYPES: as_path_hop,flow_option,flow,ifa_hop,telemetry,metric,log
EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_BATCH_DEADLINE: 2000
EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_BATCH_MAX_BYTES: 8388608
EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_DROP_FIELDS: ""
EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_ECS_ENABLE: "true"
EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_ENABLE: "true"
EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_TIMESTAMP_SOURCE: collect
EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_TLS_CA_CERT_FILEPATH: "/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt"
EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_TLS_ENABLE: "true"
EF_OUTPUT_GENERIC_HTTP_TLS_SKIP_VERIFICATION: "false"

From the flow collector server we used curl curl -vL https://my-remote-server.com:9094 to make sure the route wasn’t the issue. Testing with curl on the server and using tcpdump on the remote server, we can see they can reach each other.

The only logs related to the generic-http_output is as below (the (...) is to signify log separation:

2026-04-08T14:02:24.177+0200    debug   generic-http_output[default].http_connection_manager    httpoutput/conn_manager.go:104  setting up address connections  {"addresses": ["my-remote-server.com:9094"]}
2026-04-08T14:02:24.177+0200    debug   generic-http_output[default].http_connection_manager    httpoutput/conn_manager.go:99   running
2026-04-08T14:02:24.177+0200    info    generic-http_output[default].http_connection_manager    httpoutput/conn_manager.go:130  spawning workers        {"count": 2}
2026-04-08T14:02:24.177+0200    debug   generic-http_output[default].http_connection_manager.connection_worker[0]       httpoutput/conn_worker.go:64    connection worker created
2026-04-08T14:02:24.177+0200    debug   generic-http_output[default].http_connection_manager.connection_worker[1]       httpoutput/conn_worker.go:64    connection worker created
2026-04-08T14:02:24.177+0200    debug   generic-http_output[default].http_connection_manager    httpoutput/conn_manager.go:144  workers successfully spawned    {"count": 2}
2026-04-08T14:02:24.177+0200    debug   generic-http_output[default].http_connection_manager.connection_worker[1]       httpoutput/conn_worker.go:69    connection worker running
(...)
2026-04-08T14:02:24.181+0200    debug   generic-http_output[default].http_connection_manager.connection_worker[0]       httpoutput/conn_worker.go:69    connection worker running
(...)
2026-04-08T14:02:29.178+0200    debug   generic-http_output[default].http_connection_manager.connection_worker[1]       httpoutput/conn_worker.go:83    received connection     {"address": "my-remote-server.com:9094"}
2026-04-08T14:02:29.182+0200    debug   generic-http_output[default].http_connection_manager.connection_worker[0]       httpoutput/conn_worker.go:83    received connection     {"address": "my-remote-server.com:9094"}

Using flow collector on a RHEL machine on version 7.21.0-1. Any help or guiding would be greatly appreciated! Even a working example config may be enough, as I’ve tried to follow the documentation and used the example template config provided, but maybe I’ve missed something.

2

I was able to re-create this issue in local testing and we are investigating.

Also, please note the following from the documentation page:

The Generic HTTP output is currently a technology preview. The design and implementation are less mature than stable features and subject to change.