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:

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:

• Beats platform
• Auditbeat
• Filebeat
• Heartbeat
• Metricbeat
• Packetbeat
• Winlogbeat

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.