Filebeat

Filebeat, developed by Elastic, is a lightweight log shipper that simplifies log forwarding and centralization. It is suitable for organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises. Filebeat is commonly used by IT professionals, DevOps teams, security teams, application developers, cloud service providers, and operational technology (OT) professionals. Its versatility and ease of use make it an essential tool for log collection, analysis, and troubleshooting in various industries and professions.

Key Features

Lightweight log shipper: Filebeat enables easy log forwarding and centralization with its lightweight design, making it suitable for different environments and systems.

Log aggregation and search: Filebeat allows users to aggregate logs from various sources into a centralized location. It provides a search bar in the Logs UI of Kibana, enabling users to filter logs based on different criteria such as service, app, host, datacenter, or custom fields. Users can investigate issues and track down unusual behavior by analyzing logs from multiple sources.

Robust and reliable: Filebeat ensures reliable log forwarding even in the face of interruptions or downtime. It remembers the location where it left off in case of a connection interruption and resumes forwarding logs when the connection is restored, ensuring no log lines are missed.

Simplified log collection: Filebeat simplifies log collection, parsing, and visualization with modules for common observability and security data sources. It automatically sets default paths based on the operating system, Elasticsearch Ingest Node pipeline definitions, and Kibana dashboards. Some Filebeat modules also include preconfigured machine learning jobs for log insights.

Container and cloud readiness: Filebeat is suitable for containerized environments and cloud deployments. It can be easily deployed in Kubernetes, Docker, or cloud environments to collect logs from containers, pods, nodes, VMs, hosts, and other metadata. Filebeat's Beats Autodiscover features detect new containers and monitor them using the appropriate modules.

Backpressure-sensitive protocol: Filebeat adjusts its read pace based on the congestion status of the downstream system when sending data to Logstash or Elasticsearch. It prevents overwhelming the pipeline by slowing down its read when Logstash is busy processing data and gradually increases the pace once the congestion is resolved.

Seamless integration with Elastic Stack: Filebeat seamlessly integrates with other components of the Elastic Stack, including Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Kibana. It enables users to transform, enrich, analyze, and visualize logs and files using the capabilities of these components. Users can easily create and share dashboards in Kibana, perform analytics in Elasticsearch, or apply custom transformations in Logstash.