Introduction to Beats agents

A key characteristic of modern IT environments is that useful data is generated everywhere. Appliances sitting on the edge of your network can have important metrics to capture; a fleet of frontend, backend, and database servers can generate critical error or warning logs, and the application your customer runs can generate in-depth instrumentation and tracing related to application performance bottlenecks you care about. Data is not only dispersed across the environment but is also varied in terms of the nature of the information, how it's structured, and how it should be collected.

When data is generated, it typically will need to be shipped to a centralized logging platform for search, correlation, and analysis. Beats agents are designed to collect and ship the data to such a central destination.

Note

A log contains information about a specific event generated by a system or application while a metric is a measurement of the state of a...