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# Beats - The Lightweight Shippers of the Elastic Stack

The [Beats](https://www.elastic.co/products/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](https://github.com/elastic/beats/tree/master/libbeat), our Go
framework for creating Beats, and all the officially supported Beats:

Beat  | Description
--- | ---
[Filebeat](https://github.com/elastic/beats/tree/master/filebeat) | Tails and ships log files
[Metricbeat](https://github.com/elastic/beats/tree/master/metricbeat) | Fetches sets of metrics from the operating system and services
[Packetbeat](https://github.com/elastic/beats/tree/master/packetbeat) | Monitors the network and applications by sniffing packets
[Winlogbeat](https://github.com/elastic/beats/tree/master/winlogbeat) | Fetches and ships Windows Event logs

In addition to the above Beats, which are officially supported by
[Elastic](elastic.co), 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](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/libbeat/master/community-beats.html).

## Documentation and Getting Started

You can find the documentation and getting started guides for each of the Beats
on the [elastic.co site](https://www.elastic.co/guide/):

* [Beats platform](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/libbeat/current/index.html)
* [Filebeat](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/current/index.html)
* [Metricbeat](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/metricbeat/current/index.html)
* [Packetbeat](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/packetbeat/current/index.html)
* [Winlogbeat](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/winlogbeat/current/index.html)


## Getting Help

If you need help or hit an issue, please start by opening a topic on our
[discuss forums](https://discuss.elastic.co/c/beats). 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](https://www.elastic.co/downloads/beats).

## 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](CONTRIBUTING.md) file.

If you are creating a new Beat, you don't need to submit the code to this
repository. You can simply start working in a new repository and make use of
the libbeat packages, by following our [developer
guide](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/libbeat/master/new-beat.html).
After you have a working prototype, open a pull request to add your Beat to the
list of [community
Beats](https://github.com/elastic/beats/blob/master/libbeat/docs/communitybeats.asciidoc).

## Building Beats from the Source

See our [CONTRIBUTING](CONTRIBUTING.md) file for information about setting up your dev
environment to build Beats from the source.
