Logstash ships with many input, codec, filter, and output plugins that can be used to retrieve, transform, filter, and send logs and events from various applications, servers, and network channels.

In the previous tutorials, we discussed how to use Logstash to ship Redis logs, index emails using Logstash IMAP input plugin, and many other use cases.

In this article, we continue our journey into the rich world of Logstash input plugins focusing on the Beats family (e.g., Filebeat and Metricbeat), various file and system input plugins, network, email, and chat protocols, cloud platforms, web applications, and message brokers/platforms. Logstash currently supports over 50 input plugin — and more are coming — so covering all of them in one article is not possible. Therefore, we decided to overview some of the most popular input plugin categories to give you a general picture of what you can do with Logstash.

In Part II of the article, we’ll focus on Qbox plugins that provide various third-party integrations including SQL, Neo4j graph platform, and Couchbase Transport, and we will examine language plugins that enhance querying and analysis of the text in Korean, Chinese, Polish, Hebrew, and several other languages.

In Part I of this overview, we’ll explore the Qbox plugins for morphological and phonetic analysis, tokenization and concatenation, and native scripting, among others. By the end of this review, you’ll have a better understanding of what plugins you might wish to install on your Qbox-hosted cluster.