Extending Beats

As we learned through previous chapters, there are four core Beats provided by Elastic Team: Filebeat, Packetbeat, Metricbeat, and Winlogbeat. There is a huge list of community Beats as well available at https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/libbeat/5.1/community-beats.html.

All of these are built on top of the libbeat framework. In case you don't find a beat that meets your expectations and you want to create a new one, your new beat will also follow the same framework. This framework is designed in such a way that all you need to take care is your custom logic, which will fetch the data from a source and prepare an event to be sent to either Elasticsearch or Logstash.

In this section, we will see how to create a beat by utilizing the libbeat framework. Beats were created to minimize the usage of Logstash. We will also use the same use case used for Logstash plugin. We will read the data from a web service and index the data to Elasticsearch. For reference, all of the...