WARNING: Version 1.1 of Winlogbeat has passed its EOL date.
This documentation is no longer being maintained and may be removed. If you are running this version, we strongly advise you to upgrade. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.
Overview
editOverview
editWinlogbeat ships Windows event logs to Elasticsearch or Logstash. You can install it as a Windows service on Windows XP or later.
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
Winlogbeat is a Beat, and it is based on the libbeat framework. General information about libbeat and how to set up Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana are covered in the Beats Platform Reference.