Product release

Beats 5.0.0-rc1 released

Today we’re publishing the first public release candidate for the 5.0 version of the stack. Let your excitement grow, the 5.0 day is approaching!

Here is what changed in RC1:

Make future upgrades easier

In order to simplify adding new fields between minor versions, we have done two changes:

  • Our Elasticsearch mapping templates now automatically set unknown strings to the keyword type.
  • We make sure we always include a dot when outputting floats to Elasticsearch. If we know that the type of a field is float, but the current value has no decimals (e.g. 42), we will serialize it with zeros after the dot (in this case, 42.0000) before shipping the event to Elasticsearch.

With these changes, Elasticsearch will be able to guess the types of future fields, even if the updated mapping is not loaded yet, so the upgrade procedure will be simpler.

Other fixes

  • The default Metricbeat configuration disables the load metricset on Windows.
  • The drop_fields filter now correctly ignores missing fields and removes the ones that exist.
  • It’s again possible to set a custom BPF filter in Packetbeat.
  • Fixed an encoding issue in Filebeat when a different encoding was set then the actual encoding of the file.
  • Fixed type conversions when interpreting the configuration file.