Beats

Beats are single-purpose, lightweight data shippers that we use to get data from different servers. Beats can be installed on the servers as a lightweight agent to send system metrics, or process or file data to Logstash or Elasticsearch. They gather data from the machine on which they are installed and then send that data to Logstash, which we use to parse or transform the data before sending it to Elasticsearch, or we can send the Beats data directly into Elasticsearch.

They are quite handy as it takes almost no time to install and configure Beats to start sending data from the server on which they're installed. They're written to target specific requirements and work really well to solve use cases. Filebeat is there to work with different files like Apache log files or any other files, they keep a watch on the files, and as soon as an update happens, the updated data is shipped to Logstash or Elasticsearch. This file operation can also be configured using Logstash, but that may require some tuning; Filebeat is very easy to configure in comparison to Logstash.

Another advantage is that they have a smaller footprint and they sit on the servers from where we want the monitoring data to be sent. This makes the system quite simple because the collection of data happens on the remote machine, and then this data is sent to a centralized Elasticsearch cluster directly, or via Logstash. One more feature that makes Beats an important component of the Elastic Stack is the built-in Dashboard, which can be created in no time. We have a simple configuration in Beats to create a monitoring Dashboard in Kibana, which can be used to monitor directly or we might have to do some minor changes to use it for monitoring. There are different types of Beats, which we'll discuss here.