Software Architect's Handbook

Beats

Beats is a platform for small, lightweight data shippers. These data shippers gather data from potentially large numbers of different sources and send it to Logstash or Elasticsearch. Beats has shippers for all kinds of data:

• Filebeat: Text log files
• Metricbeat: Metrics for systems and services
• Packetbeat: Network monitoring
• Winlogbeat: Windows event logs
• Auditbeat: Audit data
• Heartbeat: Uptime monitoring

The open-source community has created beats for many other sources. Libbeat is the common library for forwarding data, which can be leveraged to create custom beats.

For logging, Filebeat can be used to aggregate log data. It is also container-ready and can be deployed in its own container on the same host. Once deployed, it can ...