Beats Agent, manage mutiples beats with a single release

[ph]

The currents beats that we have: Filebeat, Metricbeat, Auditbeat, Packetbeatand journalbeats are targetting a specific subset of monitoring data. To get the most of your data your should actually starts multiple beats on the same machine. It's not rare on production environment to starts Filebeat and Metricbeat.

To run multiples beats you need to do the following steps:

• Install the corresponding package
• Configuration the beats
• Keep them updated

Doing theses task on each beats is not the best user experience and it often means that users will not add new beats to their setup because of the required steps.

We have been thinking with a solution to simplify the deployment of beats for some time, in previous documents or issues it could have been referenced with the name "Supervisor" or "Megabeat", we are currently calling this effort the Beats agent effort and we have the following goals:

• Allow users to install a single package
• Allow users to configure a single configuration
• The agent is taking care of the installation and the configuration of the required beats.
• Release the agents in two flavor:
  • Light: Were the package only contains a single binary and required beats will installed on demand.
  • Full: Where the packages contains all the initial binaries to be executed.

The Beats Agent effort will also integrate with our Central management solution.