Filebeat is part of the Beats family of products. Their aim is to provide a lightweight alternative to Logstash that may be used directly with the application.
This way, Beats provide low overhead that scales well, whereas a centralized Logstash installation performs all the heavy lifting, including translation, filtering, and forwarding.
Apart from Filebeat, the other products from the Beats family are as follows:
- Metricbeat for performance
- Packetbeat for network data
- Auditbeat for audit data
- Heartbeat for uptime monitoring
