Beats

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[preview] This functionality is in technical preview and may be changed or removed in a future release. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

Beats are lightweight data shippers that send operational data to Elasticsearch. Elastic provides separate Beats for different types of data, such as logs, metrics, and uptime. Depending on what data you want to collect, you may need to install multiple shippers on a single host.

Data Beats

Audit data

Auditbeat

Log files and journals

Filebeat

Cloud data

Functionbeat

Availability

Heartbeat

Metrics

Metricbeat

Network traffic

Packetbeat

Windows event logs

Winlogbeat

Beats can send data to Elasticsearch directly or through Logstash, where you can further process and enhance the data before visualizing it in Kibana.

Authenticating with Elasticsearch

When you use Beats to export data to an Elasticsearch project, the Beats require an API key to authenticate with Elasticsearch. Refer to Create API key for the steps to set up your API key, and to Grant access using API keys in the Filebeat documentation for an example of how to configure your Beats to use the key.

Check out Get started with Beats for some next steps.