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Integrate Winlogbeat with ELK Stack

This guide walks you through setting up Winlogbeat on a Windows 10 VM to collect Windows Event Logs and send them to your Logstash + Elasticsearch setup.

✅ Tested with Winlogbeat 9.0.0 and ELK Stack 8.17.4

🖥️ 1. Create a Separate Windows 10 VM

Before configuring Winlogbeat, create a dedicated Windows 10 virtual machine using VirtualBox, VMware, or any hypervisor.

🔹 Minimum requirements:

• 2 GB RAM
• 2 CPU cores
• Bridged or NAT Network (accessible to Ubuntu/ELK VM)
• Enable file sharing or internet access to download Winlogbeat

📦 2. Download and Extract Winlogbeat

1. Download the .zip version of Winlogbeat.
2. Extract the contents (e.g., winlogbeat-9.0.0-windows-x86_64.zip) to:

C:\Users\<YourName>\Desktop\winlogbeat-9.0.0-windows-x86_64

⚙️ 3. Configure winlogbeat.yml

Edit the file winlogbeat.yml:

Enable Logstash Output

output.logstash:
  hosts: ["192.168.1.10:5044"]

📌 Replace 192.168.1.10 with the IP address of your Ubuntu/Logstash VM.

Disable Elasticsearch Output

# output.elasticsearch:
#   hosts: ["localhost:9200"]

🔗 4. Test Connection to Logstash

Open PowerShell and navigate to the extracted folder:

.\winlogbeat.exe test output

✅ Output should show:

connection... OK
talk to server... OK

⚠️ Warning about TLS can be ignored for non-secure lab setups.

🚀 5. Run Winlogbeat

Run Winlogbeat in real-time to confirm event log transmission:

.\winlogbeat.exe -e

📤 Logs will begin to flow to Logstash if everything is working.

🔧 6. Update logstash.conf on ELK Server

Ensure your Logstash config can accept Winlogbeat logs.

input {
  beats {
    port => 5044
  }
}

filter {
  if "winlogbeat" in [agent][name] {
    mutate {
      add_field => { "source_type" => "windows_event_log" }
    }
  }
}

output {
  if "winlogbeat" in [agent][name] {
    elasticsearch {
      hosts => ["https://localhost:9200"]
      user => "elastic"
      password => "your_password"
      ssl_enabled => true
      ssl_verification_mode => "full"
      ssl_certificate_authorities => ["/path/to/http_ca.crt"]
      index => "winlogbeat-events"
    }

    stdout { codec => rubydebug }
  }
}

🔁 Restart Logstash to apply changes.

📊 7. Visualize Windows Logs in Kibana

1. Go to Kibana > Stack Management > Data Views
2. Create a new Data View:

Pattern: winlogbeat-events

1. Go to Discover and select your new Data View to inspect logs.

🗂️ Screenshot Directory

All referenced images should be stored in:

/images/05-integrate-winlogbeat

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