Logstash vs Packetbeat: What are the differences?

Developers describe Logstash as "Collect, Parse, & Enrich Data". Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana. On the other hand, Packetbeat is detailed as "Open Source application monitoring & packet tracing system". Packetbeat agents sniff the traffic between your application processes, parse on the fly protocols like HTTP, MySQL, Postgresql or REDIS and correlate the messages into transactions.

Logstash can be classified as a tool in the "Log Management" category, while Packetbeat is grouped under "Network Monitoring".

Some of the features offered by Logstash are:

• Centralize data processing of all types
• Normalize varying schema and formats
• Quickly extend to custom log formats

On the other hand, Packetbeat provides the following key features:

• Packetbeat Statistics: Contains high-level views like the network topology, the application layer protocols repartition, the response times repartition, and others
• Packetbeat Search: This page enables you to do full text searches over the indexed network messages
• Packetbeat Query Analysis: This page demonstrates more advanced statistics like the top N slow SQL queries, the database throughput or the most common MySQL erro

Logstash and Packetbeat are both open source tools. Logstash with 10.3K GitHub stars and 2.78K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Packetbeat with 7.48K GitHub stars and 2.54K GitHub forks.