Each release of Beats brings new features and product improvements. Following are the most notable features and enhancements in 7.4.

For a complete list of highlights, see the Beats 7.4 release blog.

For a list of bug fixes and other changes, see the Beats Breaking Changes and Release Notes.

New Filebeat inputs for ingesting S3 and Kafka logsedit

The S3 input in Filebeat is a beta feature available under the Basic license, meaning it’s free to use. It ingests raw log lines from S3 buckets by leveraging SQS queues for scalable consumption. We recommend using this Filebeat input instead of the Logstash S3 input if you are looking for a horizontally scalable solution for ingesting logs from S3.

The kafka input in Filebeat enables data consumption from Kafka topics. Multiple Filebeat instances can subscribe to the same Kafka consumer group for parallel processing from topics. Additionally, the Kafka input can consume data from Azure Event Hubs given the service supports Kafka interface compatibility.

Functionbeat improvementsedit

Functionbeat now supports Logstash as an output for data processing.

We’ve also added configurable function tags that you can use for grouping, filtering, and cost allocation with AWS Lambda.

Expanded platform supportedit

In Beats 7.4.0, we’ve added support for the following platforms: