Elastic, the company behind open source projects Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, has acquired Packetbeat, a real-time network packet analytics solution built natively on Elastic’s technology stack, as well as unveiled a new open source framework called Beats for anyone to build data shippers on top of Elasticsearch.
After spending a decade working in networking packet analytics, Packetbeat founders Monica Sarbu and Tudor Golubenco experienced first-hand the complexity of analyzing and troubleshooting wire data. Realizing that existing solutions were mostly proprietary and not able to extract real-time application-level data from network packets, they sought out to create a new solution based on Elasticsearch and Kibana. With a vision to help fellow IT and network operators tap into complex, distributed systems, Packetbeat was created as the first open source solution for network packet analytics to extract real-time insights from wire data.
As Elasticsearch has become a central place to search, store, and analyze data across many use cases, Beats is Elastic’s new open source platform for anyone to build their open source data shippers for Elasticsearch. Using the Beats framework, developers can create their own ‘Beats’ and easily output them to either Elasticsearch or Logstash, as well as visualize the results in Kibana. At the heart of every Beat is libbeat, a common library for forwarding host-based metrics to Elasticsearch and the building block to creating future Beats, such as: Filebeat, the next-generation Logstash Forwarder, infrastructure data Beats, application data Beats, operating system Beats, and virtualization metrics Beats. In addition, developers can add new network protocols to Packetbeat.
“We built Packetbeat to help users monitor and troubleshoot their distributed applications by extracting insights from their network packet data and analyzing them using Elasticsearch and Kibana,” said Monica Sarbu and Tudor Golubenco, creators of Packetbeat. “We are excited to join forces with Elastic to extend the use case beyond network packet analytics to many other data types.”
“From the first time I met the Packetbeat team, I fell in love with their vision to create forwarders for all types of data based on Elasticsearch and Logstash,” said Shay Banon, Elastic Founder and CTO. "Today I’m thrilled to introduce Beats, a new open source framework to build native lightweight shippers, and Packetbeat, our first Beat, focused on network data. Our mission is to help users understand their data, and Beats helps make a dent in unraveling all those pockets of unreachable data."
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