Exploring Elastic Team Beats
As we already covered the different types of beats provided by the Elastic Team, in this section, we will explore those beats and understand their features, learn how to set them up, and how to configure the beats with the various configuration options as provided. This section will provide you with all the necessary information you will need for understanding beats in detail.
Understanding Filebeat
As discussed, Filebeat is an open source log shipping agent that has been inspired by the Logstash-forwarder project, and it's based on the Logstash-forwarder source code. Filebeat is used for monitoring logs (files or directories) and forwards those logs to either Logstash, for further processing, or to Elasticsearch, for data indexing.
Let's understand how Filebeat works with the help of its architecture, as displayed below:
Link: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/5.1/filebeat-overview.html
In the preceding image, there are a lot of new terms to understand...