Filebeat
Filebeat is an open source, lightweight log shipping agent that is installed as an agent to ship logs from local files. It monitors the log directories or specific log files, tails the files, and forwards them to Elasticsearch, Logstash, Redis, or Kafka. It is salable and provides the ability to ship logs from multiple systems to a centralized system/server, from which the logs can be parsed and processed.
Downloading and installing Filebeat
Navigate to https://www.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat and, depending on your operating system, download the .zip
/.tar
file. The installation of Filebeat is simple and straightforward:
Note
Beats version 6.0.x is compatible with Elasticsearch 5.6.x and 6.0.x, and Logstash 5.6.x and 6.0.x. The compatibility matrix can be found at https://www.elastic.co/support/matrix#matrix_compatibility. When you come across Elasticsearch and Logstash examples or usages with Beats in the chapter, make sure you have compatible versions of Elasticsearch and Logstash...