Why is Logstash not part of Elastic Cloud?

[lfk]

I'm planning to start using ELK for logging and I've opened a trial Elastic Cloud account. However, I've noticed that Logstash is not included. I thought the idea behind using Elastic Cloud was so that we wouldn't need to provision and manage our own servers and clusters. But now I need to set up and maintain a Logstash server and integrate it with my Elasticsearch cluster.

Is there something I'm missing here? Is there a better way to do this without running a Logstash server? I know I could send logs directly from Beats to Elasticsearch, but my understanding is that Beats don't allow much transforming of the logs.

[warkolm (Mark Walkom)]

@lfk

own servers and clusters

Yep, just Elasticsearch and Kibana at this stage. We are working towards Logstash though

@lfk

my understanding is that Beats don't allow much transforming of the logs

Yep, but you can also look at ingest nodes - Ingest Node | Elasticsearch Reference [6.2] | Elastic