What is WinLogBeat and how to install?

Winlogbeat is an Elastic Beat that ships Windows event logs to Elasticsearch or Logstash.  It’s based on the libbeat framework. You can install it as a Windows service.

Winlogbeat reads from one or more event logs using Windows APIs, filters the events based on user-configured criteria, then sends the event data to the configured outputs (Elasticsearch or Logstash). Winlogbeat watches the event logs so that new event data is sent in a timely manner. The read position for each event log is persisted to disk to allow Winlogbeat to resume after restarts.

Winlogbeat can capture event data from any event logs running on your system. For example, you can capture events such as:

• application events
• hardware events
• security events
• system events

Installation and configuration:

Winlogbeat comes with predefined assets for parsing, indexing, and visualizing your data. Connections to Elasticsearch and Kibana are required to set up Winlogbeat.

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

• install Winlogbeat 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

Prerequisite:

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

Download: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/beats/winlogbeat

Installation Configuration: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/winlogbeat/current/winlogbeat-installation-configuration.html

Problem & Debuging

Provide instruction for gathering critical information from Winlogbeat for diagnostic purpose.

Before you Begin:

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

Debug:

By default, Winlogbeat sends all its output to syslog. When you run Winlogbeat in the foreground, you can use the -e command line flag to redirect the output to standard error instead. For example:

winlogbeat -e

The default configuration file is winlogbeat.yml (the location of the file varies by platform). You can use a different configuration file by specifying the -c flag. For example:

winlogbeat -e -c mywinlogbeatconfig.yml

You can increase the verbosity of debug messages by enabling one or more debug selectors. For example, to view publisher-related messages, start Winlogbeat with the publisher selector:

winlogbeat -e -d “publisher”

If you want all the debugging output (fair warning, it’s quite a lot), you can use *, like this:

winlogbeat -e -d “*”