[[beats-reference]]
== What are {beats}?

{beats} are open source data shippers that you install as agents on your
servers to send operational data to
https://www.elastic.co/products/elasticsearch[{es}]. Elastic provides {beats}
for capturing:

[horizontal]
Audit data:: https://www.elastic.co/products/beats/auditbeat[Auditbeat]
Log files and journals:: https://www.elastic.co/products/beats/filebeat[Filebeat]
Cloud data:: https://www.elastic.co/products/beats/functionbeat[Functionbeat]
Availability:: https://www.elastic.co/products/beats/heartbeat[Heartbeat]
Metrics:: https://www.elastic.co/products/beats/metricbeat[Metricbeat]
Network traffic:: https://www.elastic.co/products/beats/packetbeat[Packetbeat]
Windows event logs:: https://www.elastic.co/products/beats/winlogbeat[Winlogbeat]

{beats} can send data directly to {es} or via
https://www.elastic.co/products/logstash[{ls}], where you can further process
and enhance the data, before visualizing it in
https://www.elastic.co/products/logstash[{kib}].

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

To get started, see <<getting-started>>.

Want to get up and running quickly with infrastructure metrics monitoring and
centralized log analytics?
Try out the {metrics-app} and the {logs-app} in {kib}.
For more details, see {observability-guide}/analyze-metrics.html[Analyze metrics]
and {observability-guide}/monitor-logs.html[Monitor logs].

[float]
=== Need to capture other kinds of data?

If you have a specific use case to solve, we encourage you to create a
<<community-beats,community Beat>>. We've created an infrastructure to simplify
the process. The _libbeat_ library, written entirely in Go, offers the API
that all Beats use to ship data to Elasticsearch, configure the input options,
implement logging, and more. To learn how to create a new Beat, see the
{beatsdevguide}/index.html[Beats Developer Guide].
