== Overview ++++ Beats overview ++++ 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.