Deprecation Note

We published the last version of Graylog Documentation before the release of Graylog 4.2. Now, all documentation and help content for Graylog products are available at https://docs.graylog.org/.

There will be no further updates to these pages as of October 2021.

Do you have questions about our documentation? You may place comments or start discussions about documentation here: https://community.graylog.org/c/documentation-campfire/30

Search query language

Syntax

The search syntax is very close to the Lucene syntax. By default all message fields are included in the search if you don’t specify a message field to search in.

Messages that include the term ssh:

ssh

Messages that include the term ssh or login:

ssh login

Messages that include the exact phrase ssh login:

"ssh login"

Messages where the field type includes ssh:

type:ssh

Messages where the field type includes ssh or login:

type:(ssh OR login)

Note

Elasticsearch 2.x and 5.x split queries on whitespace, so the query type:(ssh login) was equivalent to type:(ssh OR login). This is no longer the case in Elasticsearch 6.0 and you must now include an OR operator between each term.

Messages where the field type includes the exact phrase ssh login:

type:"ssh login"

Messages that have the field type:

_exists_:type

Messages that do not have the field type:

NOT _exists_:type

Note

Elasticsearch 2.x allows to use _missing_:type instead of NOT _exists_:type. This query syntax has been removed in Elasticsearch 5.0.

Messages that match regular expression ethernet[0-9]+:

/ethernet[0-9]+/

Note

Please refer to the Elasticsearch documentation about the Regular expression syntax for details about the supported regular expression dialect.

By default all terms or phrases are OR connected so all messages that have at least one hit are returned. You can use Boolean operators and groups for control over this:

"ssh login" AND source:example.org
("ssh login" AND (source:example.org OR source:another.example.org)) OR _exists_:always_find_me

You can also use the NOT operator:

"ssh login" AND NOT source:example.org
NOT example.org

Note that AND, OR, and NOT are case sensitive and must be typed in all upper-case.

Wildcards: Use ? to replace a single character or * to replace zero or more characters:

source:*.org
source:exam?le.org
source:exam?le.*

Note that leading wildcards are disabled to avoid excessive memory consumption! You can enable them in your Graylog configuration file:

allow_leading_wildcard_searches = true

Also note that message, full_message, and source are the only fields that are being analyzed by default. While wildcard searches (using * and ?) work on all indexed fields, analyzed fields will behave a little bit different. See wildcard and regexp queries for details.

Fuzziness: You can search for similar terms:

ssh logni~
source:exmaple.org~

This example is using the Damerau–Levenshtein distance with a default distance of 2 and will match “ssh login” and “example.org” (intentionally misspelled in the query).

You can change the distance like this:

source:exmaple.org~1

You can also use the fuzzyness operator to do a proximity search where the terms in a phrase can have different/fuzzy distances from each other and don’t have to be in the defined order:

"foo bar"~5

Numeric fields support range queries. Ranges in square brackets are inclusive, curly brackets are exclusive and can even be combined:

http_response_code:[500 TO 504]
http_response_code:{400 TO 404}
bytes:{0 TO 64]
http_response_code:[0 TO 64}

You can also do searches with one side unbounded:

http_response_code:>400
http_response_code:<400
http_response_code:>=400
http_response_code:<=400

It is also possible to combine unbounded range operators:

http_response_code:(>=400 AND <500)

It is possible make a range query on the date field. It is important that the selected period of time at the timepicker fits the range you want to search in. If you search in the last 5 minutes, but the searched time is a week in the past the query will not return anything. The dates needs to be UTC and the format needs to be like Graylog displays them.:

timestamp:["2019-07-23 09:53:08.175" TO "2019-07-23 09:53:08.575"]

Escaping

The following characters must be escaped with a backslash:

& | : \ / + - ! ( ) { } [ ] ^ " ~ * ?

Example:

resource:\/posts\/45326