Product release

Beats 6.0.0-beta2 released

Today we are excited to announce the Beats 6.0.0-beta2 release. As we are getting closer to the GA of 6.0, this release is primarily about bug fixes, but there are also a few new features.

Before going through the highlights, let’s get those handy links out of the way:

More consistency in Beats dashboards

As more and more dashboards are shipped with each Beat, it becomes challenging to identify which dashboard or visualization comes from which module. So, in the Beta2 release, we renamed the dashboards, searches, and visualisations of Filebeat and Metricbeat to follow a set of common naming guidelines: the dashboards start with [<Beat name> <module name>], and the visualizations and searches end with the same identifier. We plan to extend this naming practice across all dashboards created by Elastic products.

Configurable index name in dashboards

The dashboards that are shipped with each Beat are correlated with the name of the index, where the Beat’s data is stored in Elasticsearch. In case you are you using a different index than the default beatname-*, then you would need to adjust the dashboards before using them. Starting with the Beta2 release, this step is much easier as you can configure the index name when loading the Beats dashboards.

./metricbeat setup -E setup.dashboards.index=testbeat-* -e

where testbeat-* is the index name where Metricbeat is storing its data.

Add support for newer Kafka versions

The Beta2 release comes with support for newer versions of Kafka, including the latest 0.11.0.0 release. This is a result of upgrading the Sarama client library that Beats is using to connect to Kafka. The new Kafka versions are supported by the Kafka output as well as by the Metricbeat Kafka module. This release also brings support for lz4 compression to the Kafka output.

Known issues

There's a couple of issues that we have discovered and fixed but are still present in Beta2. Don't worry, we already have solutions for them and they will be closed by the time 6.0 become GA. If you are affected by any of these bugs, look in the associated tickets for workarounds.

  • #5039 Packetbeat exists with an error if the flows configuration is not specified.
  • #5059 The --setup flag is not working, but the setup command works.

Become a Pioneer

A big “Thank You” to everyone that has tried the alpha or beta releases and posted issues or provided feedback. We’d like to also remind you that if you post a valid, non-duplicate bug report during the alpha/beta period against any of the Elastic stack projects, you are entitled to a special gift package. You can find more details about the Pioneer Program in the main release blog post.