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Beats: From Discovery to Expertise

Discover everything you need to know about the deployment, configuration, and administration of Beats. Master the collection of metrics, logs...

3 chapters12 lessonsEN
At your pace, through practice.

By the end of this course you will be able to

  • Collect logs with Filebeat and its modules
  • Collect system metrics with Metricbeat
  • Make collection reliable (disk queues, TLS, keystore)
  • Migrate to Elastic Agent or Grafana Alloy

🎯 Level : Intermediate👥 Who it is for : Operators collecting logs and metrics with the Elastic stack

LEARNING PATH

Course curriculum

0Course Overview1 lesson
  1. Assessment quizQuiz · ⏱ 10 min
1Introduction8 lessons
  1. Beats: Filebeat - Winlogbeat - Metricbeat - ...Lesson
  2. Beats: Configuration with or without modulesLesson
  3. Elastic Agent: FleetLesson
  4. OpenTelemetryLesson
  5. Other Sources: Syslog - Fluent Bit - ...Lesson
  6. Adding a Queue: Kafka - RabbitMQ - Redis ...Lesson
  7. Setting up the Testing EnvironmentHands-on lab · ⏱ 21 min · Level 1/5
  8. Filebeat InstallationHands-on lab · ⏱ 15 min · Level 2/5
2Going Further3 lessons
  1. Going further: security, performance, Elastic Agent and migrationArticle · ⏱ 8 min
  2. Beats best practicesArticle · ⏱ 9 min
  3. Lab: Collect nginx logs with Filebeat into ElasticsearchHands-on lab · ⏱ 40 min · Level 2/5

LEARN BY DOING

Use cases & applications

Filebeat

Send logs from local servers to Logstash or Elasticsearch.

Metricbeat

Monitor the health (CPU, RAM, Disk) of servers.

Winlogbeat

Collect Windows security events.

Packetbeat

Intercept and analyze network traffic.

Elastic Agent

Simplify massive agent deployment with Fleet.

Client-side Filtering

Transform and filter data on the client side before sending it to Elasticsearch.

Recommended prerequisites

Elasticsearch : de la découverte à l'expertise

What next?

Logstash: from discovery to expertiseAlloy: From Discovery to ExpertiseDynatrace: From Discovery to Expertise

Frequently asked questions

What are Beats?

They are lightweight agents from the Elastic stack installed on servers to collect data.

Filebeat vs Logstash?

Filebeat collects and sends logs in a lightweight way, while Logstash is a heavy transformation engine.

What is Metricbeat?

An agent dedicated to collecting system and service metrics.

Beats or Elastic Agent?

Elastic Agent is the new unified solution intended to replace individual Beats.

What is Fleet?

The centralized interface in Kibana for configuring and updating Elastic Agents at scale.

Do they work on Windows?

Yes, Winlogbeat is specifically designed for Windows event logs.

Where do they send the data?

Mainly to Elasticsearch or Logstash, but also to Kafka or Redis.

Do they consume a lot of resources?

No, they are written in Go and designed to be very lightweight.

What are modules?

Ready-to-use configurations for common systems (Nginx, MySQL) including dashboards.

Is the transport secure?

Yes, they support SSL/TLS encryption and authentication.