Filebeat is a lightweight shipper for forwarding and centralizing log data. Installed as an agent on your servers, Filebeat monitors the log files or locations that you specify, collects log events, and forwards them to either to  or  for indexing.

Here’s how Filebeat works: When you start Filebeat, it starts one or more inputs that look in the locations you’ve specified for log data. For each log that Filebeat locates, Filebeat starts a harvester. Each harvester reads a single log for new content and sends the new log data to libbeat, which aggregates the events and sends the aggregated data to the output that you’ve configured for Filebeat.

 

To add the Beats repository for YUM:

1. Download and install the public signing key:

   sudo rpm --import https://packages.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch

2. Create a file with a .repo extension (for example, elastic.repo) in your /etc/yum.repos.d/directory and add the following lines:

   [elastic-6.x]name=Elastic repository for 6.x packagesbaseurl=https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/6.x/yumgpgcheck=1gpgkey=https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearchenabled=1autorefresh=1type=rpm-md

   Your repository is ready to use. For example, you can install Filebeat by running:

   sudo yum install filebeat

3. To configure the Beat to start automatically during boot, run:

   sudo chkconfig --add filebeat