Packetbeat does not add Kubernetes metadata - elasticsearch

Question

I've started a minikube (using Kubernetes 1.18.3) to test out ECK and specifically packetbeat. The minikube profile is called "packetbeat" (important, as that's the hostname for the Virtualbox VM as well) and I followed the ECK quickstart to get it up and running. ElasticSearch (single node) and Kibana are running fine and packetbeat is gathering flows as well, however, I'm unable to make it add the Kubernetes metadata to the fields.
I'm working in the default namespace and created a ClusterRoleBinding to view for the default ServiceAccount in the namespace. This is working well, if I do not do that, packetbeat will report it is unable to list the Pods on the API server.
This is the Beat config I'm using to make ECK deploy packetbeat:
apiVersion: beat.k8s.elastic.co/v1beta1
kind: Beat
metadata:
name: packetbeat
spec:
type: packetbeat
version: 7.9.0
elasticsearchRef:
name: quickstart
kibanaRef:
name: kibana
config:
packetbeat.interfaces.device: any
packetbeat.protocols:
- type: http
ports: [80, 8000, 8080, 9200]
- type: tls
ports: [443]
packetbeat.flows:
timeout: 30s
period: 10s
processors:
- add_kubernetes_metadata: {}
daemonSet:
podTemplate:
spec:
terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 30
hostNetwork: true
automountServiceAccountToken: true # some older Beat versions are depending on this settings presence in k8s context
dnsPolicy: ClusterFirstWithHostNet
containers:
- name: packetbeat
securityContext:
runAsUser: 0
capabilities:
add:
- NET_ADMIN
(This is mostly a slightly modified example from the ECK example page.) However, this is not working at all. I tried it with "add_kubernetes_metadata: {}" first, but that will error with the message:
2020-08-19T14:23:38.550Z ERROR [kubernetes] kubernetes/util.go:117
kubernetes: Querying for pod failed with error: pods "packetbeat" not
found {"libbeat.processor": "add_kubernetes_metadata"}
This message goes away when I add the "host: packetbeat". I'm no longer getting an error now, but I'm not getting the Kubernetes metadata either. I'm mostly interested in the namespace tag, but I'm not getting any. I do not see any additional errors in the log and it just reports monitoring details every 30 seconds at the moment.
What am I doing wrong? Any more information I can provide to help me debug this?

Answer 1

So the docs are just unclear. Although they do not explicitely state it, you do need to add indexers and matchers. My understanding was that there are "default" ones (as you can disable those), but that does not seem to be the case. Adding the indexers and matchers as per the example in the docs makes the Kubernetes metadata part of the data.