Beats
Beats is a collection of lightweight, open-source data shippers that send data from edge machines to centralized logging systems like Elasticsearch or Logstash. It is part of the Elastic Stack (formerly ELK Stack) and is designed for simple, agent-based data collection from various sources such as logs, metrics, and network data. Each Beat is a specialized tool, such as Filebeat for log files, Metricbeat for system metrics, and Packetbeat for network traffic.
Developers should learn and use Beats when they need to efficiently collect and ship data from distributed systems, servers, or applications to a centralized monitoring or logging platform like Elasticsearch. It is particularly useful in DevOps, cloud-native environments, and microservices architectures for real-time log aggregation, performance monitoring, and security analysis, as it simplifies data ingestion with minimal resource overhead.