Brewing in Beats: Monitor system Uptime with Metricbeat

Welcome to Brewing in Beats! With this weekly series, we're keeping you up to date with what's new in Beats, including the latest commits and releases.

Metricbeat: iostat metrics

This PR, contributed by @PChou, adds a number of new metrics to the diskio metricset, which provide the same functionality as the iostat command. These are going to be super useful when investigating disk issues.

  • iostat.read_request_merged_per_sec
  • iostat.write_request_merged_per_sec
  • iostat.read_request_per_sec
  • iostat.write_request_per_sec
  • iostat.read_byte_per_sec
  • iostat.write_byte_per_sec
  • iostat.avg_request_size
  • iostat.avg_queue_size
  • iostat.await
  • iostat.service_time
  • iostat.busy

These metrics are only available on Linux, and we plan to release them with version 6.1.

Metricbeat: system uptime metricset

With this PR, the system module in Metricbeat gets an “uptime” metricset. Like the name suggests, it exports the system uptime in milliseconds. It’s a simple addition, but it can be really helpful to detect system restarts and such. In the default configuration, this metricset is configured to send a document every 15m. The uptime metricset is available on all supported platforms.

This feature is currently scheduled to be released with 6.1.

Set default credentials for Kibana configuration

Starting with Beats 6.0, the dashboards are loaded via a  Kibana API. While this improves the overall experience, it requires a bit more configuration because the Kibana endpoint needs to be configured as well.

In a typical x-pack installation, the same username and password can be used for connecting to both Elasticsearch as for Kibana. So to reduce the number of required configuration changes, this pull request copies the credentials configured in the Elasticsearch output to the Kibana configuration. This means that you won’t have to configure the same username and password twice. You can still provide different credentials if needed.

This improvement will be included in 6.0.

Other changes

Repository: elastic/beats

Affecting all Beats

Changes in master:

  • Remove setup deprecation message #4889
  • Change deprecated _default_ mapping to doc in index templates #4864
  • Add SetValue method to libbeat common.MapStr #4838
  • Increase API version for Beats monitoring #4793
Metricbeat

Changes in master:

  • Fix missing MongoDB config from the modules.d folder #4870
  • Fix MySQL CRUD expression #4857
Heartbeat

Changes in master:

Testing

Changes in master:

  • Bootstrap xpack password #4875
  • Wait for registry to exist on tests #4862
  • Fix flaky appveyor filebeat test #4861
Infrastructure

Changes in master:

  • Update build_docs.sh script to support dev-guide #4873
Documentation

Changes in master:

  • filebeat: remove unreferenced image from documentation #4844
  • Fix link to image in FBM Postgres docs #4843
  • Update Filebeat development guide && create _meta/kibana/default folder #4787
  • Added breaking changes doc for 6.0 #4760

Changes in 5.5:

  • Fix doc for target field at decode_json_fields #4845

Changes in 6.0:

  • Update Filebeat development guide && create _meta/kibana/default folder #4787
  • Updated changelog for 6.0.0-beta1 #4846
  • Set docs version to beta1 #4781