Elastic Beats

Elastic Beats at a glance

Elastic Beats are lightweight open-source data shippers (Filebeat, Metricbeat, Winlogbeat and more) that send logs and metrics to Elasticsearch or Logstash. Beats ship regular releases in step with the Elastic Stack plus security fixes; as agents deployed broadly with access to logs and credentials, keeping them current matters.

For admins Beats' versions should stay compatible with your Elasticsearch/Logstash version — keep the stack roughly in step and check the support matrix. They're usually deployed across many hosts, so update them through configuration management for consistency. Each Beat reads sensitive data (logs, event data) and ships it onward with configured credentials — protect the configuration and enable TLS to the outputs. Keep them current for parser and security fixes. After updating, verify that data still flows and no modules broke. Following Elastic's licensing changes, some use OpenSearch's shippers instead. Track releases; patchletter surfaces new Beats versions so agent fixes land across the fleet.