Product release

Beats 6.0.0-rc1 released

作者
Monica Sarbu

Today we are excited to announce the first public release candidate for the Beats 6.0. The 6.0 release day is approaching!

The release is primarily about bug fixes and performance improvements, but we do have a change we want to highlight. But before that, let’s get those handy links out of the way:

Lower number of shards in default configurations

Starting with 6.0, the number of shards and other Elasticsearch mapping templates can be changed directly from the Beats configuration files. This is convenient because it lets you easily adapt the size of the shards depending on how much data your Beats create. In RC1, we took this a step further and added explicit settings for the number of shards in the default configuration files. These settings overwrite the default number of shards that Elasticsearch has, which is 5.

With this release we changed the default number of shards to 1 for the Beats that create metrics (Metricbeat and Heartbeat) and 3 for the Beats that create events (Filebeat, Winlogbeat, Auditbeat, and Packetbeat). This change should result in a lower amount of shards created for a small to medium installation using the default configuration.

If you have lots of Beats, or for other reasons expect high indexing throughput, you should consider increasing the number of shards in the Beats configuration.

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 pre-GA 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 blog post.