Beats is a platform for small, lightweight data shippers. These data shippers gather data from potentially large numbers of different sources and send it to Logstash or Elasticsearch. Beats has shippers for all kinds of data:
- Filebeat: Text log files
- Metricbeat: Metrics for systems and services
- Packetbeat: Network monitoring
- Winlogbeat: Windows event logs
- Auditbeat: Audit data
- Heartbeat: Uptime monitoring
The open-source community has created beats for many other sources. Libbeat is the common library for forwarding data, which can be leveraged to create custom beats.
For logging, Filebeat can be used to aggregate log data. It is also container-ready and can be deployed in its own container on the same host. Once deployed, it can collect logs from all of the containers running on that host.
Filebeat works seamlessly with Logstash. During periods where there is a higher volume of log data being processed, Logstash can let Filebeat know to slow down the reading of the log data until the volume lowers so that processing can return to the regular pace.