Technical use case - system monitoring with Metricbeat

Metricbeat is way more than just a system metric shipper. It has an extensible module architecture that comes with out-of-the-box-modules, as illustrated in the following diagram:

Metricbeat architecture

As shown in the preceding diagram, Metricbeat is capable of shipping metrics from web servers (Apache, Nginx), databases (MongoDB, MySQL, postgresql), and even Redis or Zookeeper. Furthermore, Elastic provides online documentation for developers who want to create their own Metricbeat, so one can easily extend the out-of-the-box features.

In this book, we'll use the system module, which comes as the default configuration of Metricbeat. You will be able to monitor your computer or laptop and visualize the data in Kibana 5.0. This is just an example of what you will be able to do with Metricbeat. If you think on a larger scale, you can imagine distributing Metricbeat shippers all over a datacenter, using a centralized Kibana instance to...