Beats version 5.0.0-alpha2

Affecting all Beats

On DEB/RPM installations, the binary files are now found under /usr/share/{{beat_name}}/bin, not in /usr/bin. 1385
The logs are written by default to self rotating files, instead of syslog. 1371
Remove deprecated host option from elasticsearch, logstash and redis outputs. 1474

Packetbeat

Filebeat

Default location for the registry file was changed to be data/registry from the binary directory, rather than .filebeat in the current working directory. This affects installations for zip/tar.gz/source, the location for DEB and RPM packages stays the same. 1373

Affecting all Beats

Drain response buffers when pipelining is used by Redis output. 1353
Unterminated environment variable expressions in config files will now cause an error 1389
Fix issue with the automatic template loading when Elasticsearch is not available on Beat start. 1321
Fix bug affecting -cpuprofile, -memprofile, and -httpprof CLI flags 1415
Fix race when multiple outputs access the same event with logstash output manipulating event 1410 1428
Seed random number generator using crypto.rand package. https://github.com/elastic/beats/pull/1503{1503]
Fix beats hanging in -configtest 1213
Fix kafka log message output 1516

Filebeat

Improvements in registrar dealing with file rotation. 1281
Fix issue with JSON decoding where @timestamp or type keys with the wrong type could cause Filebeat to crash. 1378
Fix issue with JSON decoding where values having null as values could crash Filebeat. 1466
Multiline reader normalizing newline to use \n. 1552

Winlogbeat

Fix panic when reading messages larger than 32K characters on Windows XP and 2003. 1498
Fix panic that occurs when reading a large events on Windows Vista and newer. 1499

Affecting all Beats

Add support for TLS to Redis output. 1353
Add SOCKS5 proxy support to Redis output. 1353
Failover and load balancing support in redis output. 1353
Multiple-worker per host support for redis output. 1353
Added ability to escape ${x} in config files to avoid environment variable expansion 1389
Configuration options and CLI flags for setting the home, data and config paths. 1373
Configuration options and CLI flags for setting the default logs path. 1437
Update to Go 1.6.2 1447
Add Elasticsearch template files compatible with Elasticsearch 2.x. 1501
Add scripts for managing the dashboards of a single Beat 1359

Packetbeat

Topbeat