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System Observability: Logging, Metrics & Tracing (ELK + OpenTelemetry) · Lesson

Beats: Lightweight Data Shippers

Discover the Beats family that ships logs and metrics into the ELK Stack, when to use Filebeat versus Metricbeat, and how Beats fit alongside Logstash.

What Are Beats?

Beats are lightweight, single-purpose agents installed on your servers to collect data and ship it to Elasticsearch or Logstash. They use few resources, ideal for edge collection.

The Beats Family

Each Beat targets one data type.

  • Filebeat for log files
  • Metricbeat for system and service metrics
  • Packetbeat for network data
  • Heartbeat for uptime checks

All lessons in this course

  1. Elasticsearch: Indexing and Search
  2. Logstash: Data Ingestion and Processing
  3. Kibana: Visualization and Dashboards
  4. Beats: Lightweight Data Shippers
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