/dev/null

/dev/null: Blackhole destination for testing or discarding events without storing them.

This is a null destination that discards (drops) every data it receives, but reports that it has successfully received the data. This is useful sometimes for testing and performance measurements, for example, to find out if a real destination is the bottleneck, or another element in the upstream pipeline.

CAUTION:

All data that’s sent to the /dev/null destination only is irrevocably lost.

Steps

  1. Create a new destination.

    1. Open the Axoflow Console.
    2. Select Topology.
    3. Select + Create New Item > Destination.

  2. Configure the destination.

    1. Select /dev/null.

    2. Enter a name for the destination.

      Configure the null destination

    3. (Optional): Add custom labels to the destination.

    4. Select Create.

  3. Create a flow to connect the new destination to an AxoRouter instance.

    1. Select Flows.

    2. Select Create New Flow.

    3. Enter a name for the flow, for example, my-test-flow.

      Create a flow

    4. In the Router Selector field, enter an expression that matches the router(s) you want to apply the flow. To select a specific router, use a name selector, for example, name = my-axorouter-hostname.

      It also makes more complex filtering possible, using the Equals, Contains (partial match), and Match (regular expression match) operators. Note that:

      • To execute the search, click Search, or hit ESC then ENTER.
      • Axoflow Console autocompletes the built-in and custom labels and field names, as well as their most frequent values, but doesn’t autocomplete labels and variables created by data parsing and processing steps.
      • You can use the AND and OR operators to combine expressions, and also parenthesis if needed.

    5. Select the Destination where you want to send your data. If you don’t have any destination configured, see Destinations.

      By default, you can select only external destinations. If you want to send data to another AxoRouter, enable the Show all destinations option, and select the connector of the AxoRouter where you want to send the data.

      AxoRouter as destination

    6. (Optional) To process the data transferred in the flow, select Add New Processing Step. For details, see Processing steps. For example:

      1. Add a Classify, a Parse, and a Reduce step, in that order, to automatically remove redundant and empty fields from your data.
      2. To select which messages are processed by the flow, add a Select Messages step, and enter a filter into the Query field. For example, to select only the messages received from Fortinet FortiGate firewalls, use the meta.vendor = fortinet AND meta.product = fortigate query.
      3. Save the processing steps.

      Example processing steps

    7. Select Create.

    8. The new flow appears in the Flows list.

      The new flow