Logstash, Beats, Elastic Agent, Open Telemetry — what’s the right choice?
summary
Compares Logstash, Beats, Elastic Agent and OpenTelemetry by concrete tradeoffs: Beats are tiny, purpose-built collectors; Elastic Agent bundles Beats plus Fleet for central policy management and UI, currently managing ~50,000 agents in practice while work continues on disk spooling and Kafka outputs; ingest pipelines can parse/enrich but lack good monitoring so heavy custom logic still runs in Logstash for heavy custom processing; OpenTelemetry is production-ready for traces, maturing for metrics, logs still incomplete; migration inertia is the main operational constraint.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction and overview
- 1:06What is Logstash
- 4:15What are Beats
- 10:13Elastic Agent explained
- 16:14OpenTelemetry overview
- 21:55ECS and schema standards
- 24:45Q&A and closing
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