Process name is limitated to 15 chars in Linux

[abraxxa]

See https://discuss.elastic.co/t/proc-name-limited-to-15-chars/36034.

Thanks!

[UserNotFound]

/proc/[pid]/cmdline also contains the information I was wanting to see logged with topbeat. Everything I am interested in logging is "qemu-kvm" or "python" and of very little value without the full command.

[root@ftp00 ~]# cat /proc/15469/stat
15469 (python) S 15466 15469 15469 0 -1 4202752 29048 1939 96 0 1418 161 1 1 20 0 1 0 871492921 678961152 9479 18446744073709551615 4194304 4196532 140733742263776 140733742257984 139951301103955 0 0 20451328 16386 18446744071580752109 0 0 17 0 0 0 294 0 0

[root@ftp00 ~]# cat /proc/15469/cmdline 
../virtualenv/bin/pythonmanage.pysftpd--bind=16--uid=555--gid=555--key=/etc/ssh/site.com.key--realm=testrealm2--proxy

[andrewkroh]

@UserNotFound See #533

[UserNotFound]

Ah, I was able to track down that this was committed and merged before 1.1.0 was released, but was not included in the release. Thanks @andrewkroh !

[ruflin]

Closing this issue as problem was solved.

[monicasarbu]

I am still able to reproduce the issue in Metricbeat 5.3 on macOS. The system.process.name is limited to 15 characters, so I am reopening the issue.

[abraxxa]

Thanks Monica!

[sundarv85]

+1 - This is an issue both in Linux and OSX.

[jsoriano]

As mentioned in the original discuss thread, this is caused by a limitation in the operating systems, the comm value, used for process names in Linux, is limited to 16 bytes including the termination null, so I think there is little we can do against that. Other POSIX systems as OSX have probably similar limitations too.

As a workaround, users may use other fields to identify processes, as system.process.cmdline or system.process.cgroup.id. This can work well for specific use cases as the mentioned before in this issue, but I don't think they can be used to obtain a name in a generic way.

I'm closing this, but I am happy to reopen it if someone has another proposal to collect process names.