Other Changesedit

The following list of implementation changes should not affect your experience migrating from Logstash Forwarder, but you should be aware of the changes. Please post GitHub issues if you notice any regressions from Logstash Forwarder.

Packagingedit

The packaging process for Filebeat uses the Beats infrastructure, so some aspects of packaging, such as the init scripts, are different from Logstash Forwarder. Please post GitHub issues if you hit any issues with the new packages.

One notable change is the name of the registry file. The name varies depending on the package type:

  • .filebeat for .tar.gz and .tgz archives
  • /usr/lib/filebeat/registry for DEB and RPM packages
  • c:\ProgramData\filebeat\registry for the Windows zip file

Publisher Improvementsedit

Behind the scenes, Filebeat uses a sightly improved protocol for communicating with Logstash.

TLS Is Off by Defaultedit

If you follow the section on migrating the configuration, you will have TLS enabled. However, you must be aware that if the tls section is missing from the configuration file, Filebeat uses an unencrypted connection to talk to Logstash.

Loggingedit

Filebeat uses libbeat logging and can also log to rotating files instead of syslog.