Product release

Beats 1.0.0-rc1 released

By
Monica Sarbu

We are pleased to announce the release of Beats 1.0.0-rc1.

Lots of fixes and improvements

Thank you everyone for testing the 1.0.0-beta4 release and for the help making the Beats better! We received a lot positive feedback along with a long list of issues, many of them Windows-related. There have been 100 pull requests going into this release!

For more details on changes that went into each Beat, have a look at release notes for Topbeat, Packetbeat, and Filebeat.

Breaking changes

Up to the beta4 release, Beats were using the “timestamp” field for storing the date and time information. With the addition of Filebeat and the Logstash integration, this started to cause confusion because Logstash uses “@timestamp” for date and time, and automatically adds it to the record. Having two timestamps with almost the same information ended up being redundant.

So, based on your feedback, we decided to rename “timestamp” to “@timestamp” in all Beats before the GA release, resulting in only one consistently-named timestamp field.  Unfortunately, this change changes the structure of the Beats events, so the data generated with older Beats is not compatible with the new Kibana dashboards distributed with each Beat. However, the existing dashboards will continue to work with the old data.

When upgrading to 1.0.0-rc1, you need to reload the template and the dashboards to visualize the new data in Kibana.  Follow the getting started guide on loading the Topbeat template, the Filebeat template, the Packetbeat template, and also for loading the sample Kibana dashboards. If you have configured the Beat to send data via Logstash, you need to update the Logstash Input Beats Plugin to the latest version in order to work with the “@timestamp” change.

Apt and yum repositories

It’s now easier to install Packetbeat, Filebeat, and Topbeat, using the apt and yum commands. All packages are now signed and uploaded to packages.elastic.co where all the other Elastic products are also available.

Happy testing

The more beta testers we have, the sooner we can release Beats 1.0.0 GA, so please download Packetbeat, Topbeat, or Filebeat, try it out, and let us know what you think on Twitter (@elastic) or on our forum. You can report any problems on the Packetbeat, Topbeat, or Filebeat GitHub issues page.