Generating the Beat Index Pattern

The index-pattern defines the format of each field, and it’s used by Kibana to know how to display the field. If you change the fields exported by the Beat, you need to generate a new index pattern for your Beat. Otherwise, you can just use the index pattern available under the kibana/*/index-pattern directory.

The Beat index pattern is generated from the fields.yml, which contains all the fields exported by the Beat. For each field, besides the type, you can configure the format field. The format informs Kibana about how to display a certain field. A good example is percentage or bytes to display fields as 50% or 5MB.

To generate the index pattern from the fields.yml, you need to run the following command in the Beat repository:

make update