Introducing Beats

Beats are lightweight data shippers that are installed as agents on edge servers to ship operational data to Elasticsearch. Just like Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, and Beats are open source products too. Depending on the use case, Beats can be configured to ship the data to Logstash for transforming the events prior to pushing the events to Elasticsearch. 

The Beats framework is made up of a library called libbeat which provides infrastructure to simplify the process of shipping the operation data to Elasticsearch. It offers the API that all Beats can use to ship data to an output (such as Elasticsearch, Logstash, Redis, Kafka, and so on), configure the input/output options, process the events, implement logging, and more. The Libbeat library is built using the Go programming language. Go was chosen to build Beats because it's easy to learn, very resource friendly, and as it's statically compiled it's easy to deploy.

Elastic.co has built and maintained several Beats such...