This documentation contains work-in-progress information for future Elastic Stack and Cloud releases. Use the version selector to view supported release docs. It also contains some Elastic Cloud serverless information. Check out our serverless docs for more details.

« Filebeat overview Set up and run Filebeat »

›

Filebeat quick start: installation and configuration

edit

Filebeat quick start: installation and configuration

edit

This guide describes how to get started quickly with log collection. You’ll learn how to:

install Filebeat on each system you want to monitor
specify the location of your log files
parse log data into fields and send it to Elasticsearch
visualize the log data in Kibana

Before you begin

edit

You need Elasticsearch for storing and searching your data, and Kibana for visualizing and managing it.

To get started quickly, spin up a deployment of our hosted Elasticsearch Service. The Elasticsearch Service is available on AWS, GCP, and Azure. Try it out for free.

Step 1: Install Filebeat

edit

Install Filebeat on all the servers you want to monitor.

To download and install Filebeat, use the commands that work with your system:

Version 8.17.0 of Filebeat has not yet been released.

The commands shown are for AMD platforms, but ARM packages are also available. Refer to the download page for the full list of available packages.

Other installation options

edit

Step 2: Connect to the Elastic Stack

edit

Connections to Elasticsearch and Kibana are required to set up Filebeat.

Set the connection information in filebeat.yml. To locate this configuration file, see Directory layout.

Specify the cloud.id of your Elasticsearch Service, and set cloud.auth to a user who is authorized to set up Filebeat. For example:

cloud.id: "staging:dXMtZWFzdC0xLmF3cy5mb3VuZC5pbyRjZWM2ZjI2MWE3NGJmMjRjZTMzYmI4ODExYjg0Mjk0ZiRjNmMyY2E2ZDA0MjI0OWFmMGNjN2Q3YTllOTYyNTc0Mw=="
cloud.auth: "filebeat_setup:YOUR_PASSWORD"

This examples shows a hard-coded password, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore.

Set the host and port where Filebeat can find the Elasticsearch installation, and set the username and password of a user who is authorized to set up Filebeat. For example:

output.elasticsearch:
  hosts: ["https://myEShost:9200"]
  username: "filebeat_internal"
  password: "YOUR_PASSWORD" 
  ssl:
    enabled: true
    ca_trusted_fingerprint: "b9a10bbe64ee9826abeda6546fc988c8bf798b41957c33d05db736716513dc9c"

This example shows a hard-coded password, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore.

This example shows a hard-coded fingerprint, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore. The fingerprint is a HEX encoded SHA-256 of a CA certificate, when you start Elasticsearch for the first time, security features such as network encryption (TLS) for Elasticsearch are enabled by default. If you are using the self-signed certificate generated by Elasticsearch when it is started for the first time, you will need to add its fingerprint here. The fingerprint is printed on Elasticsearch start up logs, or you can refer to connect clients to Elasticsearch documentation for other options on retrieving it. If you are providing your own SSL certificate to Elasticsearch refer to Filebeat documentation on how to setup SSL.

If you plan to use our pre-built Kibana dashboards, configure the Kibana endpoint. Skip this step if Kibana is running on the same host as Elasticsearch.

  setup.kibana:
    host: "mykibanahost:5601" 
    username: "my_kibana_user"  
    password: "{pwd}"

	The hostname and port of the machine where Kibana is running, for example, `mykibanahost:5601`. If you specify a path after the port number, include the scheme and port: `http://mykibanahost:5601/path`.
	The `username` and `password` settings for Kibana are optional. If you don’t specify credentials for Kibana, Filebeat uses the `username` and `password` specified for the Elasticsearch output.
	To use the pre-built Kibana dashboards, this user must be authorized to view dashboards or have the `kibana_admin` built-in role.

To learn more about required roles and privileges, see Grant users access to secured resources.

You can send data to other outputs, such as Logstash, but that requires additional configuration and setup.

Step 3: Collect log data

edit

There are several ways to collect log data with Filebeat:

Data collection modules — simplify the collection, parsing, and visualization of common log formats
ECS loggers — structure and format application logs into ECS-compatible JSON
Manual Filebeat configuration

Enable and configure data collection modules

edit

Identify the modules you need to enable. To see a list of available modules, run:

filebeat modules list

filebeat modules list

./filebeat modules list

./filebeat modules list

PS > .\filebeat.exe modules list

From the installation directory, enable one or more modules. For example, the following command enables the nginx module config:

filebeat modules enable nginx

filebeat modules enable nginx

./filebeat modules enable nginx

./filebeat modules enable nginx

PS > .\filebeat.exe modules enable nginx

In the module config under modules.d, change the module settings to match your environment. You must enable at least one fileset in the module. Filesets are disabled by default.

For example, log locations are set based on the OS. If your logs aren’t in default locations, set the paths variable:
```
- module: nginx
  access:
    enabled: true
    var.paths: ["/var/log/nginx/access.log*"] 
```

To see the full list of variables for a module, see the documentation under Modules.

To test your configuration file, change to the directory where the Filebeat binary is installed, and run Filebeat in the foreground with the following options specified: ./filebeat test config -e. Make sure your config files are in the path expected by Filebeat (see Directory layout), or use the -c flag to specify the path to the config file.

For more information about configuring Filebeat, also see:

Configure Filebeat
Config file format
filebeat.reference.yml: This reference configuration file shows all non-deprecated options. You’ll find it in the same location as filebeat.yml.

Enable and configure ECS loggers for application log collection

edit

While Filebeat can be used to ingest raw, plain-text application logs, we recommend structuring your logs at ingest time. This lets you extract fields, like log level and exception stack traces.

Elastic simplifies this process by providing application log formatters in a variety of popular programming languages. These plugins format your logs into ECS-compatible JSON, which removes the need to manually parse logs.

See ECS loggers to get started.

Configure Filebeat manually

edit

If you’re unable to find a module for your file type, or can’t change your application’s log output, see configure the input manually.

Step 4: Set up assets

edit

Filebeat comes with predefined assets for parsing, indexing, and visualizing your data. To load these assets:

Make sure the user specified in filebeat.yml is authorized to set up Filebeat.
From the installation directory, run:
```
filebeat setup -e
```
```
filebeat setup -e
```
```
./filebeat setup -e
```
```
./filebeat setup -e
```
```
PS > .\filebeat.exe setup -e
```
-e is optional and sends output to standard error instead of the configured log output.

This step loads the recommended index template for writing to Elasticsearch and deploys the sample dashboards for visualizing the data in Kibana.

This step does not load the ingest pipelines used to parse log lines. By default, ingest pipelines are set up automatically the first time you run the module and connect to Elasticsearch.

A connection to Elasticsearch (or Elasticsearch Service) is required to set up the initial environment. If you’re using a different output, such as Logstash, see:

Filebeat should not be used to ingest its own log as this may lead to an infinite loop.

Step 5: Start Filebeat

edit

Before starting Filebeat, modify the user credentials in filebeat.yml and specify a user who is authorized to publish events.

To start Filebeat, run:

sudo service filebeat start

If you use an init.d script to start Filebeat, you can’t specify command line flags (see Command reference). To specify flags, start Filebeat in the foreground.

Also see Filebeat and systemd.

sudo service filebeat start

If you use an init.d script to start Filebeat, you can’t specify command line flags (see Command reference). To specify flags, start Filebeat in the foreground.

Also see Filebeat and systemd.

sudo chown root filebeat.yml 
sudo chown root modules.d/nginx.yml 
sudo ./filebeat -e

You’ll be running Filebeat as root, so you need to change ownership of the configuration file and any configurations enabled in the modules.d directory, or run Filebeat with --strict.perms=false specified. See Config File Ownership and Permissions.

sudo chown root filebeat.yml 
sudo chown root modules.d/nginx.yml 
sudo ./filebeat -e

PS C:\Program Files\filebeat> Start-Service filebeat

By default, Windows log files are stored in C:\ProgramData\filebeat\Logs.

Filebeat should begin streaming events to Elasticsearch.

Step 6: View your data in Kibana

edit

Filebeat comes with pre-built Kibana dashboards and UIs for visualizing log data. You loaded the dashboards earlier when you ran the setup command.

To open the dashboards:

Launch Kibana:
1. Log in to your Elastic Cloud account.
2. Navigate to the Kibana endpoint in your deployment.
Point your browser to http://localhost:5601, replacing localhost with the name of the Kibana host.
In the side navigation, click Discover. To see Filebeat data, make sure the predefined filebeat-* data view is selected.

If you don’t see data in Kibana, try changing the time filter to a larger range. By default, Kibana shows the last 15 minutes.
In the side navigation, click Dashboard, then select the dashboard that you want to open.

The dashboards are provided as examples. We recommend that you customize them to meet your needs.

What’s next?

edit

Now that you have your logs streaming into Elasticsearch, learn how to unify your logs, metrics, uptime, and application performance data.

Ingest data from other sources by installing and configuring other Elastic Beats:

Elastic Beats To capture

Metricbeat

Infrastructure metrics

Winlogbeat

Windows event logs

Heartbeat

Uptime information

APM

Application performance metrics

Auditbeat

Audit events

Elastic Beats	To capture
Metricbeat	Infrastructure metrics
Winlogbeat	Windows event logs
Heartbeat	Uptime information
APM	Application performance metrics
Auditbeat	Audit events

Use the Observability apps in Kibana to search across all your data:

Elastic apps	Use to
Metrics app	Explore metrics about systems and services across your ecosystem
Logs app	Tail related log data in real time
Uptime app	Monitor availability issues across your apps and services
APM app	Monitor application performance
SIEM app	Analyze security events

« Filebeat overview Set up and run Filebeat »