This list summarizes the most important enhancements in Beats. For the complete list, go to Beats release highlights.

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.