Introduction

Packagebeat is a Beat for collecting information about system packages from package managers and shipping it to Elasticsearch

Package Managers

Packagebeat currently supports the following package managers:

• dpkg (Debian, Ubuntu)
• RPM (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL)

with hopes for supporting the following (please consider contributing any of these):

• pip (Python)
• gem (Ruby)
• npm (node.js)
• chocolatey (Windows)
• pacman (ArchLinux)
• nix (NixOS)
• guix (GuixSD)

Download

Binaries are available on the releases page.

Install

The release package contains the following:

• packagebeat binary
• Example packagebeat.yml
• The Elasticsearch mapping template: packagebeat.template.json

Install the mapping template before running Packagebeat:

curl -XPUT 'http://localhost:9200/_template/packagebeat' -d@packagebeat.template.json

Add the following to your favorite process manager:

packagebeat -c /etc/packagebeat/packagebeat.yml

Data

Package information data is stored in the following format:

{
   "@timestamp": "2099-01-01T00:00:00.000Z",
   "beat": {
     "hostname": "863bc3d673ad",
     "name": "863bc3d673ad"
   },
   "type": "package",
   "manager": "dpkg",
   "name": "tar",
   "version": "1.27.1-2+b1",
   "summary": "GNU version of the tar archiving utility",
   "architecture": "amd64"
 }

Building

go get github.com/joehillen/packagebeat

Testing

Unit Tests:

go test ./...

Integration Testing:

Testing on different Linux distributions is done using docker-compose:

docker-compose up

You can inspect the results using Kibana at http://localhost:5601