== Overview

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<titleabbrev>Beats overview</titleabbrev>
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The _Beats_ are open source data shippers that you install as _agents_ on
your servers to send different types of operational data to
https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch[Elasticsearch]. Beats can
send data directly to Elasticsearch or send it to Elasticsearch via Logstash, which
you can use to parse and transform the data.

_Packetbeat_, _Filebeat_, _Metricbeat_, and _Winlogbeat_ are a few examples of _Beats_. Packetbeat
is a network packet analyzer that ships information about the transactions
exchanged between your application servers. Filebeat ships log files from your servers. Metricbeat is a server monitoring agent
that periodically collects metrics from the operating systems and services
running on your servers. And Winlogbeat ships Windows event logs.

image:./images/beats-platform.png[Beats Platform]

If you have a specific use case to solve, we encourage you to create your own
Beat. We created an infrastructure to simplify the process. The _libbeat_
library, written entirely in Golang, offers the API that all Beats use to
ship data to Elasticsearch, configure the input options, implement logging,
and more.
