How to install Filebeat?

We will start with Introduction to Filebeat and then end post with installing filebeat.

1. What is Filebeat?

Filebeat is a light-weight log shipper. It is installed as a agent and listen to your predefined set of log files and locations and forward them to your choice of sink (Logstash, Elasticsearch, database etc.).

2. Installing Filebeat

You can install Filebeat with deb, rpm, mac, docker and windows. We will look into each one of them in detail below.

deb

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat/filebeat-6.3.2-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i filebeat-6.3.2-amd64.deb

rpm

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat/filebeat-6.3.2-x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -vi filebeat-6.3.2-x86_64.rpm

mac

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat/filebeat-6.3.2-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzvf filebeat-6.3.2-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz

docker

docker pull docker.elastic.co/beats/filebeat:6.3.2

Windows Download the filebeat from official website and do the following configurations.

  1. Extract the zip file to your choice of location. e.g. C:\Program Files.
  2. Rename the filebeat--windows directory to Filebeat.
  3. Open a PowerShell prompt as an Administrator (right-click the PowerShell icon and select Run As Administrator).
  4. From the PowerShell prompt, run the following commands to install Filebeat as a Windows service:
// Command to execute from powershell
cd 'C:\Program Files\Filebeat' 
.\install-service-filebeat.ps1

Tags: ELK stack, Configuring Filebeat, Filebeat, Setting up Filebeat

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