I currently have Logstash 1.5.5 shipper installed on all my boxes. For the most part, no issues. They all go into a largish Elasticsearch cluster and are fronted by Kibana. No problem collecting a bunch of files with logstash-shipper from the nodes. But, one box continually crashes, about once per day and I figure that's good enough reason to chuck 1.5.5 on all and upgrade to Beats as its written in a better language (Go), shouldn't have the same issues of memory leaks (hopefully) and may crash less often (or never).
My question, assuming all the above is true is: given a logstash-shipper.conf file which has standard syntax for redirecting a lot of logfiles, what is the most painless way to migrate from 1.5.5 to beats instead. Is it backward compatible with the logstash-shipper.conf file? If not, is there a converter? Is the syntax similarly trivial?
Is Beats reliable enough (yet) to entrust things to like precious logs. I don't want crashing logstash forwarders and shippers. Once this is done, I do not want to revisit it.
