Logstash output ~~ Logstash input

Hi

Our architecture:

  • One logstash instance accepting all of the log-courier shippers from N machines.
  • Output from this logstash into two unique logstash instances, > stage and > production.
  • Each of these instances > stage and > production will feed stage and production elasticsearch clusters respectively.

Question(s):

What is the best way to output from one logstash instance into the input of another logstash instance. I was thinking of probably using the lumberjack output to the lumberjack input, but does anyone have any other ideas? Curious if many people have done this before? And as to other thoughts on setting up a stage environment, is there a better way of doing it?
thank you!

I'd put a broker in there to decouple it, redis/kafka/MQ.