Beats

Beats example

The Beats

are open source data shippers that you install as agents on your servers to send different types of operational data to Elasticsearch. Beats can send data directly to Elasticsearch or send it to Elasticsearch via Logstash, which you can use to parse and transform the data.

MetricBeat

Metricbeat is a lightweight shipper that you can install on your servers to periodically collect metrics from the operating system and from services running on the server. Metricbeat takes the metrics and statistics that it collects and ships them to the output that you specify. We can send this statistics directly to the Elasticsearch.

Metricbeat could work in conjunction with several services like PostgreSQL, Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, Windows, System and many others.

For example you can use System module. This module is enabled by default to collect metrics about your server, such as CPU usage, memory usage, network IO metrics, and process statistics

Installation & Configuration of MetricBeat

Download the suitable release from this page

After you will unpack it, you need to set it up properly, by changing metricbeat.yml file

Since we going to send data directly to Elasticsearch add the following line:

output.elasticsearch:
    hosts:[”localhost:9200"]

We also would want to use pre-built Kibana dashboards, so add the following to the config as well:

setup.kibana:
    host:"localhost:5601»

And after this one run command:

./metricbeat setup--dashboards

How to run and check MetricBeat is working

sudo chown root metricbeat.yml
sudo chown root modules.d/system.yml
sudo ./metricbeat -e -c metricbeat.yml -d "publish”

Open http://localhost:5601/ On the Discover page, make sure that the predefined metricbeat-* index pattern is selected to see the data.