Running Filebeat in windows

Question

I set up filebeat on windows recently using these instructions

https://www.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat

but it forces me to keep a cmd prompt open running the command

filebeat.exe -c filebeat.yml

I am wondering if there is a way to run this as a background process?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Try walking through the full Getting Started guide for Filebeat. There are instructions for Windows. Basically the instructions are:

1. Extract the download file anywhere.

2. Move the extracted directory into Program Files.

   PS > mv filebeat-5.1.2-windows-x86_64 "C:\Program Files\Filebeat"
   

3. Install the filebeat service.

   PS > cd "C:\Program Files\Filebeat"
   PS C:\Program Files\Filebeat> powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy UnRestricted -File .\install-service-filebeat.ps1
   

4. Edit the filebeat.yml config file and test your config.

   PS C:\Program Files\Filebeat> .\filebeat.exe -e test config
   

5. (Optional) Run Filebeat in the foreground to make sure everything is working correctly. Ctrl+C to exit.

   PS C:\Program Files\Filebeat> .\filebeat.exe -c filebeat.yml -e -d "*"
   

6. Start the service.

   PS > Start-Service filebeat
   

And if you need to stop it, use Stop-Service filebeat. You might need to stop it and start it if you want to make changes to the config.