Beats - The Lightweight Shippers of the Elastic Stack

The Beats are lightweight data
shippers, written in Go, that you install on your servers to capture all sorts
of operational data (think of logs, metrics, or network packet data). The Beats
send the operational data to Elasticsearch, either directly or via Logstash, so
it can be visualized with Kibana.

By "lightweight", we mean that Beats have a small installation footprint, use
limited system resources, and have no runtime dependencies.

This repository contains
libbeat, our Go
framework for creating Beats, and all the officially supported Beats:

Beat	Description
Auditbeat	Collect your Linux audit framework data and monitor the integrity of your files.
Filebeat	Tails and ships log files
Heartbeat	Ping remote services for availability
Metricbeat	Fetches sets of metrics from the operating system and services
Packetbeat	Monitors the network and applications by sniffing packets
Winlogbeat	Fetches and ships Windows Event logs
Osquerybeat	Runs Osquery and manages interaction with it.

In addition to the above Beats, which are officially supported by
Elastic, the community has created a set of other Beats
that make use of libbeat but live outside of this Github repository. We maintain
a list of community Beats
here.

Documentation and Getting Started

You can find the documentation and getting started guides for each of the Beats
on the elastic.co site:

Documentation and Getting Started information for the Elastic Agent

You can find the documentation and getting started guides for the Elastic Agent
on the elastic.co site

Getting Help

If you need help or hit an issue, please start by opening a topic on our
discuss forums. Please note that we
reserve GitHub tickets for confirmed bugs and enhancement requests.

Downloads

You can download pre-compiled Beats binaries, as well as packages for the
supported platforms, from this page.

Contributing

We'd love working with you! You can help make the Beats better in many ways:
report issues, help us reproduce issues, fix bugs, add functionality, or even
create your own Beat.

Please start by reading our CONTRIBUTING file.

AI Coding Agents

Repository instructions for AI coding agents are in AGENTS.md.
To use it, copy it to the agent-specific filename: CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md,
and similar files, which are ignored by Git.

Building Beats from the Source

See our CONTRIBUTING file for information about setting up
your dev environment to build Beats from the source.

Snapshots

For testing purposes, we generate snapshot builds that you can find here. Please be aware that these are built on top of main and are not meant for production.

CI

PR Comments

It is possible to trigger some jobs by putting a comment on a GitHub PR.
(This service is only available for users affiliated with Elastic and not for open-source contributors.)

beats CI pipeline
- /test will kick off a default build.
docs CI pipeline
- run docs-build will kick off a docs build.

PR Labels

It's possible to configure the build on a GitHub PR by labeling the PR with certain labels. Elastic users can find more details at https://docs.elastic.dev/ingest-dev-docs/beats/beats-ci.