- Packetbeat Reference: other versions:
- Overview
- Getting started with Packetbeat
- Setting up and running Packetbeat
- Upgrading Packetbeat
- Configuring Packetbeat
- Set traffic capturing options
- Set up flows to monitor network traffic
- Specify which transaction protocols to monitor
- Specify which processes to monitor
- Specify general settings
- Configure the internal queue
- Configure the output
- Configure index lifecycle management
- Specify SSL settings
- Filter and enhance the exported data
- Define processors
- Add cloud metadata
- Add fields
- Add labels
- Add the local time zone
- Add tags
- Decode JSON fields
- Drop events
- Drop fields from events
- Keep fields from events
- Rename fields from events
- Add Kubernetes metadata
- Add Docker metadata
- Add Host metadata
- Dissect strings
- DNS Reverse Lookup
- Add process metadata
- Parse data by using ingest node
- Enrich events with geoIP information
- Configure project paths
- Configure the Kibana endpoint
- Load the Kibana dashboards
- Load the Elasticsearch index template
- Configure logging
- Use environment variables in the configuration
- YAML tips and gotchas
- HTTP Endpoint
- packetbeat.reference.yml
- Exported fields
- AMQP fields
- Beat fields
- Cassandra fields
- Cloud provider metadata fields
- Common fields
- DHCPv4 fields
- DNS fields
- Docker fields
- ECS fields
- Flow Event fields
- Host fields
- HTTP fields
- ICMP fields
- Kubernetes fields
- Memcache fields
- MongoDb fields
- MySQL fields
- NFS fields
- PostgreSQL fields
- Process fields
- Raw fields
- Redis fields
- Thrift-RPC fields
- TLS fields
- Transaction Event fields
- Measurements (Transactions) fields
- Monitoring Packetbeat
- Securing Packetbeat
- Visualizing Packetbeat data in Kibana
- Troubleshooting
- Contributing to Beats
Packetbeat overview
editPacketbeat overview
editPacketbeat is a real-time network packet analyzer that you can use with Elasticsearch to provide an application monitoring and performance analytics system. Packetbeat completes the Beats platform by providing visibility between the servers of your network.
Packetbeat works by capturing the network traffic between your application servers, decoding the application layer protocols (HTTP, MySQL, Redis, and so on), correlating the requests with the responses, and recording the interesting fields for each transaction.
Packetbeat can help you easily notice issues with your back-end application, such as bugs or performance problems, and it makes troubleshooting them - and therefore fixing them - much faster.
Packetbeat sniffs the traffic between your servers, parses the application-level protocols on the fly, and correlates the messages into transactions. Currently, Packetbeat supports the following protocols:
- ICMP (v4 and v6)
- DHCP (v4)
- DNS
- HTTP
- AMQP 0.9.1
- Cassandra
- Mysql
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
- Thrift-RPC
- MongoDB
- Memcache
- NFS
- TLS
Packetbeat can insert the correlated transactions directly into Elasticsearch or into a central queue created with Redis and Logstash.
Packetbeat can run on the same servers as your application processes or on its own servers. When running on dedicated servers, Packetbeat can get the traffic from the switch’s mirror ports or from tapping devices. In such a deployment, there is zero overhead on the monitored application. See Set traffic capturing options for details.
After decoding the Layer 7 messages, Packetbeat correlates the requests with the responses in what we call transactions. For each transaction, Packetbeat inserts a JSON document into Elasticsearch. See the Exported fields section for details about which fields are indexed.
The same Elasticsearch and Kibana instances that are used for analysing the network traffic gathered by Packetbeat can be used for analysing the log files gathered by Logstash. This way, you can have network traffic and log analysis in the same system.
Packetbeat is an Elastic Beat. It’s
based on the libbeat framework. For more information, see the
Beats Platform Reference.