Chapter 6: Collecting and Shipping Data with Beats
Previous chapters looked at how Elasticsearch can be used to search and analyze data to solve various use cases. Given that data can be generated anywhere in your environment, and on a large range of source systems, a key challenge to solve is collecting and shipping this data to your data platform.
In this chapter, we'll look at how Beats agents can be used to collect and transport events from a number of source systems to Elasticsearch. The agent you use will depend on the nature of the event (whether it's a log or metric) and how it can be extracted (using a REST API, tailing a file, or instrumenting an application). The chapter also demonstrates how Beats modules help keep the schema and format of your data consistent for downstream use cases (such as searching, alerting, and machine learning analysis).
In this chapter, we will specifically focus on the following:
- How a Beats agent works and the different...
