1 Introduction to Fluent Bit

Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice in Wonderland that you should "Begin at the beginning." So that's what we'll do in the chapter. Before we get down to the details, let's take a moment to understand what Fluent Bit is and answer some important questions about it, like why it is so important and worthy of its own book. How does it fit into the IT ecosystem? For some, address the elephant in the room – what is the relationship between Fluentd and Fluent Bit?

1.1 Fluent Bit, and why is it so important?

Fluent Bit is, at its heart, a specialized event capture and distribution tool. Let’s break that statement down a bit more; so why specialized? Because its focus is on log events, metrics, and traces (sometimes referred to as signals). The most straightforward description of these types of events are:

1.1.1 The value of event distribution

1.1.2 Fluent’s place in CNCF

1.2 Core Fluent Bit concepts

1.2.1 Fluent Bit's payload structure

1.2.2 Fluent Bit Logical Architecture

1.3 Drivers of Fluent Bit adoption

1.3.1 Small footprint, efficient and very quick

1.3.2 Impact of OpenTelemetry

1.3.3 Extending Fluent Bit with C, Go, WebAssembly, and Lua

1.3.4 Fluent Bit and stream-processing

1.4 Fluent Bit and Fluentd – a child or a successor?

1.5 How we’re going to discover Fluent Bit

1.5.1 How much Kubernetes will this book involve?

1.5.2 Logging in Action

1.6 Summary