WARNING: Version 1.0.1 of Beats has passed its EOL date.
This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be removed. If you are running this version, we strongly advise you to upgrade. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.
Getting Startededit
A regular Beats setup consists of:
- One or more Beats. You install Beats on your servers to capture the data. For installation steps, see the documentation for your Beat.
- Elasticsearch for storage and indexing. See Installing Elasticsearch.
- Optionally Logstash for inserting data into Elasticsearch. See Installing Logstash (Optional).
- Kibana for the UI. See Installing Kibana.
- Kibana dashboards for visualizing the data. See Loading Kibana Dashboards.
See the Elastic Support Matrix for information about supported operating systems and product compatibility.
To get started, you can install Elasticsearch and Kibana on a single VM or even on your laptop. The only condition is that the machine must be accessible from the servers you want to monitor. As you add more Beats and your traffic grows, you’ll want to replace the single Elasticsearch instance with a cluster. You’ll probably also want to automate the installation process.