The Beats are lightweight data shippers, written in Go, that you install on your servers to capture all sorts of operational data (think of logs, metrics, or network packet data). The Beats send the operational data to Elasticsearch, either directly or via Logstash, so it can be visualized with Kibana.
By "lightweight", we mean that Beats have a small installation footprint, use limited system resources, and have no runtime dependencies.
This repository contains libbeat, our Go framework for creating Beats, and all the officially supported Beats:
| Beat | Description |
|---|---|
| Filebeat | Tails and ships log files |
| Heartbeat | Ping remote services for availability |
| Metricbeat | Fetches sets of metrics from the operating system and services |
| Packetbeat | Monitors the network and applications by sniffing packets |
| Winlogbeat | Fetches and ships Windows Event logs |
In addition to the above Beats, which are officially supported by Elastic, the community has created a set of other Beats that make use of libbeat but live outside of this Github repository. We maintain a list of community Beats here.
You can find the documentation and getting started guides for each of the Beats on the elastic.co site:
If you need help or hit an issue, please start by opening a topic on our discuss forums. Please note that we reserve GitHub tickets for confirmed bugs and enhancement requests.
You can download pre-compiled Beats binaries, as well as packages for the supported platforms, from this page.
We'd love working with you! You can help make the Beats better in many ways: report issues, help us reproduce issues, fix bugs, add functionality, or even create your own Beat.
Please start by reading our CONTRIBUTING file.
If you are creating a new Beat, you don't need to submit the code to this repository. You can simply start working in a new repository and make use of the libbeat packages, by following our developer guide. After you have a working prototype, open a pull request to add your Beat to the list of community Beats.
See our CONTRIBUTING file for information about setting up your dev environment to build Beats from the source.