Brewing in Beats: Heartbeat, for uptime monitoring

Heartbeat 💓

Heartbeat is the newest Beat to join the main beats repository. Heartbeat does active uptime monitoring via ICMP, TCP, and HTTP and stores the availability status and the round trip times in Elasticsearch. It already supports things like SSL, authentication, or proxies.

Heartbeat is also able to reload the list of monitored targets and to resolve all the IP addresses behind a DNS name and test them all. This is useful, for example, to check the uptime of all the hosts behind an ELB.

Heartbeat development is still ongoing. We plan to release a first officially supported versions in the next few months.

Libbeat: Add EC2, GCE, or DigitalOcean metadata

The new Beats processor does a one time query of the respective cloud APIs and adds a meta object in all events created by the Beat, making it easy to filter in Kibana by things like the region or the machine type. See the pull request for example objects from each of the supported cloud platforms.

Beats-tester: test default configuration

Now that we can easily overwrite config settings with -E, we can use the default configuration files in the packaging tests, and only overwrite what we need to be different in tests. This has the advantage that we test the default configuration files in realistic conditions.

Fix requested privileges on Windows

Fixed an issue where the Metricbeat system module was requesting too broad privileges. We expect this to fix cases where Metricbeat was not able to read process information.

Fix “actual free” memory on Windows

In the Metricbeat system module for Windows, fixed “actual free” to refer available physical memory, not available virtual memory.

Fix for the Kafka output

Fixes an issue where the Kafka output would continuously resend the same batch of messages if one of them was too large to be accepted by Kafka.

Fix for Filebeat

Fixed an issue where if If clean_removed and clean_inactive were used together, states were not directly removed from the registry.