iptables logging

I’ve been trying to log iptables to a file. from my understanding its suppose to log to kern.log or messages but that doesn’t seem to be happening. when using the Digital Ocean console when inputting ‘iptables -A INPUT -j LOG’ it’ll start logging the NIC but outputs it to the console not to kern.log or messages. even adding ‘kern.warning /var/log/iptables.log’ to rsyslog yields the same results. What am I doing wrong or how can I monitor traffic and log to file as this is how I was monitoring traffic and rejecting IPs via fail2ban and log files with regular expressions but that doesn’t seem to work anymore. any help would be appreciated. Thanks.