Grant privileges and roles needed for publishing

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Users who publish events to Elasticsearch need to create and write to Filebeat indices. To minimize the privileges required by the writer role, use the setup role to pre-load dependencies. This section assumes that you’ve run the setup.

When using ILM, turn off the ILM setup check in the Filebeat config file before running Filebeat to publish events:

setup.ilm.check_exists: false

To grant the required privileges:

  1. Create a writer role, called something like filebeat_writer, that has the following privileges:

    The monitor cluster privilege and the create_doc and auto_configure privileges on filebeat-* indices are required in every configuration.

    Type Privilege Purpose

    Cluster

    monitor

    Retrieve cluster details (e.g. version)

    Cluster

    read_ilm

    Read the ILM policy when connecting to clusters that support ILM. Not needed when setup.ilm.check_exists is false.

    Cluster

    read_pipeline

    Check for ingest pipelines used by modules. Needed when using modules.

    Index

    create_doc on filebeat-* indices

    Write events into Elasticsearch

    Index

    auto_configure on filebeat-* indices

    Update the datastream mapping. Consider either disabling entirely or adding the rule filebeat-* to the cluster settings action.auto_create_index to prevent unwanted indices creations from the agents.

    Omit any privileges that aren’t relevant in your environment.

  2. Assign the writer role to users who will index events into Elasticsearch.