elastic/beats
Beats
Beats is a collection of lightweight, modular agents designed to gather, process, and forward operational telemetry from distributed infrastructure to centralized storage and analysis platforms. These agents function as a distributed data transport layer, decoupling the collection of logs, metrics, and network events from their final delivery destination. By maintaining local state and managing data flow, the system ensures reliable transmission of information across heterogeneous environments.
The project distinguishes itself through a modular pipeline architecture that allows for the assembly of specialized agents using shared library building blocks. Each agent is compiled as a statically linked binary, enabling deployment across diverse infrastructure without external runtime dependencies. During the ingestion process, the system automatically enriches raw telemetry with contextual metadata from host systems and cloud environments, while applying backpressure-aware flow control to manage data volume based on destination responsiveness.
The platform covers a broad range of observability tasks, including system performance monitoring, network traffic analysis, and security auditing. It supports the collection of diverse data types such as application logs, Windows event logs, infrastructure metrics, and network packets. Users can filter and parse incoming data streams before forwarding them to centralized storage engines or message queues, ensuring that only relevant information is indexed for long-term analysis.