PRESS RELEASE

Elastic Acquires Packetbeat: The First Real-Time, Open Source Network Packet Analytics Solution

Introduces Beats, a new platform to build data shippers for network data, log files, infrastructure metrics, and more
27 May 2015

Contact information

Amy White

Elastic Communications


Mountain View, Calif. and Amsterdam, The Netherlands - 27 May 2015 -

Elastic, the company behind the popular open source projects Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana with more than 20 million downloads, today announced it has acquired Packetbeat, a real-time network packet analytics solution built natively on Elastic’s technology stack, as well as unveiled a new open source framework called Beats for anyone to build data shippers on top of Elasticsearch.

Packetbeat: The First Elasticsearch Data Shipper for Wire Data

After spending a decade working in networking packet analytics, Packetbeat founders Monica Sarbu and Tudor Golubenco experienced first-hand the complexity of analyzing and troubleshooting wire data. Realizing that existing solutions were mostly proprietary and not able to extract real-time application-level data from network packets, Monica and Tudor sought out to create a new solution based on Elasticsearch and Kibana. With a vision to help fellow IT and network operators tap into complex, distributed systems, Packetbeat was created as the first open source solution for network packet analytics to extract real-time insights from wire data.

Beats: The Future of Elasticsearch Data Shippers for All Types of Data

As Elasticsearch has become a central place to search, store, and analyze data across many use cases, Beats is Elastic’s new open source platform for anyone to build their open source data shippers for Elasticsearch. Using the Beats framework, developers can create their own ‘Beats’ and easily output them to either Elasticsearch or Logstash, as well as visualize the results in Kibana. At the heart of every Beat is libbeat, a common library for forwarding host-based metrics to Elasticsearch and the building block to creating future Beats, such as: Filebeat, the next-generation Logstash Forwarder, infrastructure data Beats, application data Beats, operating system Beats, and virtualization metrics Beats. In addition, developers can  add new network protocols to Packetbeat. 

“We built Packetbeat to help users monitor and troubleshoot their distributed applications by extracting insights from their network packet data and analyzing them using Elasticsearch and Kibana,” said Monica Sarbu and Tudor Golubenco, creators of Packetbeat. “We are excited to join forces with Elastic to extend the use case beyond network packet analytics to many other data types.”

“From the first time I met the Packetbeat team, I fell in love with their vision to create forwarders for all types of data based on Elasticsearch and Logstash,” said Shay Banon, Elastic Founder and CTO. "Today I’m thrilled to introduce Beats, a new open source framework to build native lightweight shippers, and Packetbeat, our first Beat, focused on network data. Our mission is to help users understand their data, and Beats helps make a dent in unraveling all those pockets of unreachable data."

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About Elastic

Founded in 2012 by the people behind the Elasticsearch and Apache Lucene open source projects, Elastic provides real-time insights and makes massive amounts of structured and unstructured data usable for developers and enterprises. By focusing on scalability, ease-of-use, and ease-of-integration, Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana power many of the world’s leading mobile, social, consumer and business applications. Since its initial release, the open source stack has achieved more than 25 million cumulative downloads.

Elastic is backed by Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures, and NEA with headquarters in Amsterdam and Mountain View, California, and offices and employees around the world. To learn more, visit www.elastic.co.