Introduction to Beats

Before learning about Beats, let's understand how Beats first came into existence. Beats was not started as a project within Elastic, the company behind the ELK Stack. It all started with the Packetbeat project, wherein they wanted access to statistics between communications among various servers, providing them information.

They wanted to develop a solution which would store data in Elasticsearch, but would not consume high memory or resources. They faced the problem of using a Logstash agent on each server from which information was required, which used JVM and consumed a lot of memory and resources. Packetbeat became popular due to its ability to provide lightweight shippers, which ship the data to Elasticsearch without consuming much memory and CPU resources. Following its popularity, Elastic acquired Packetbeat and created the Beats Platform. The Beats Platform contains a number of Beats which have been developed by Elastic; this also contains Community Beats, which...