Best way to manage a bunch of beats

Elastic Stack Beats
1

Hi there!

Looking at the available beats

  1. https://www.elastic.co/products/beats
  2. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/libbeat/current/community-beats.html

it seems that the trend is to create a single beat for every single piece of software.
Don't you think that it looks to be quite difficult to manage a number of beats which also have to be monitored?
What do you think regarding plugin-like approach and a single daemon?

2

We're definitely aware that we cannot expect people to run 20 Beats :-). We currently have an effort to group some of the Beats that have very similar functionality (poll an API then capture metrics) into a single Metricbeat. So we expect that for most people, running Filebeat and Metricbeat will be enough.

We also plan to offer all the elastic Beats into a single binary form, but we're only in the design phase for that.
The reason we didn't do it so far is that Go doesn't have a good way of handling plugins.

1 Like
3

Hi @tudor!

Thanks a lot for clarification.
Does it make sense to look at how mozilla's heka implements plugin-like mechanism by means of lua?

4

That's interesting, thanks for the link, I'll check it.