Fluent Bit: The Fight to Get Grafana Connected (And Failing… Again) CyberDefendLab — Episode #4
🚨 Fluent Bit is Broken. Grafana is NOT Connected. This Is the Brutal Reality of Cybersecurity Troubleshooting. 🚨
"You ever feel like you’re stuck in an endless loop of debugging? Yeah.
Welcome to Episode #4 of my free-tier home SOC lab build. Spoiler alert: Grafana is STILL not receiving logs."
This episode isn’t about victory. It’s about hitting a wall, breaking everything, rolling back progress, and realizing that sometimes… troubleshooting feels like an unwinnable game.
📌 What went wrong this time?
✔ Fluent Bit was running.
✔ Rsyslog was collecting logs.
✔ Grafana was installed.
✔ I had a simple goal: Make sure Fluent Bit only keeps logs for one hour to avoid overwhelming my free-tier setup.
🚨 But then? Everything collapsed.
🔥 What Happened in Episode #4?
✅ Step 1: I tried to implement automatic log deletion in Fluent Bit.
💥 Step 2: Fluent Bit crashed immediately.
💥 Step 3: Grafana was STILL not connected.
💥 Step 4: I had to rollback everything just to get Fluent Bit running again.
🎯 I went from making progress… to breaking everything… to being right back where I started.
🔎 Step-by-step breakdown of my biggest mistakes:
📌 Fluent Bit Log Retention Attempt (Failure)
[FILTER]
Name record_modifier
Match *
Record timestamp ${time}
[FILTER]
Name throttle
Match *
Rate 1
Window 3600
🔍 The Result?
❌ Fluent Bit entered a restart loop.
❌ Filter initialization failed.
❌ No logs were being processed.
📌 Rolling Back the Damage (Emergency Fix)
sudo nano /etc/fluent-bit/fluent-bit.conf
sudo systemctl restart fluent-bit
sudo journalctl -u fluent-bit -f
✅ Fluent Bit is running again. But that’s it. No log retention fix. No Grafana success. Just survival.
💣 Why This Matters for Home SOC Labs
Cybersecurity is not just about knowing the right commands—it’s about dealing with frustration, failures, and endless troubleshooting. If you're building your own SOC lab, you WILL break things. You WILL hit walls. And sometimes, your only success is undoing the damage.
This episode is a raw, unfiltered look at what cybersecurity troubleshooting really feels like—not the polished version you see in textbooks, but the grind, the setbacks, and the moments where you question everything.
🎯 What’s Next? Episode #5
I have two major problems to fix before I can move forward:
1️⃣ Grafana is STILL not connected.
2️⃣ Fluent Bit still doesn’t have proper log retention controls.
🔥 Episode #5 is where I take another shot at solving these issues—WITHOUT breaking everything again. Will I succeed?
Or will this lab collapse completely?
💬 Drop a comment: Have you ever tried fixing something and completely broke it instead? Let’s talk about it.
📢 Subscribe so you don’t miss Episode #5!
🔔 Turn on notifications so you catch the next breakdown (or breakthrough).
#CyberDefendLab #HomeSOC #Cybersecurity #FluentBit #Grafana #Rsyslog #Logging #SIEM #TechTroubleshooting #SOCTraining #ITLab #SecurityAnalyst
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