Creating a New Beat

This guide walks you through the steps for creating a new Elastic Beat. The Beats are a collection of lightweight daemons that collect operational data from your servers and ship it to Elasticsearch or Logstash. The common parts for all Beats are placed in the libbeat library, which contains packages for sending data to Elasticsearch and Logstash, for configuration file handling, for signal handling, for logging, and more. By using this common framework, you can ensure that all Beats behave consistently and that they are easy to package and run with common tools.

In this guide, you learn how to use the Beat generator to create source code for an example Beat called Countbeat. The Beat generator creates all the files required for a working Beat. To create your own Beat, you modify the generated files and implement the custom logic needed to collect the data you want to ship.

The following topics describe how to build a new Beat: