[[load-balancing]]
== Load balance the output hosts

Filebeat provides configuration options that you can use to fine
tune load balancing when sending events to multiple hosts.

To enable load balancing, you specify `loadbalance: true` when you configure
the output. For example:

[source,yaml]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
output.logstash:
  hosts: ["localhost:5044", "localhost:5045"]
  loadbalance: true
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The `loadbalance` option is available for Redis, Logstash, and Elasticsearch
outputs. The Kafka output handles load balancing internally.

The load balancer also supports multiple workers per host. The default is
`worker: 1`. If you increase the number of workers, additional network
connections will be used.  The total number of workers participating
in load balancing is `number of hosts * workers`.

Example:

[source,yaml]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
filebeat.prospectors:
- type: log
  paths:
    - /var/log/*.log
output.logstash:
  hosts: ["localhost:5044", "localhost:5045"]
  loadbalance: true
  worker: 2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In this example, there are 4 workers participating in load balancing.
