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Elasticsearch : Windows Event Logs : Winlogbeat


My first foray into the Security SIEM seems is going to be with the prodigal ELK stack. Keeping the discussion later, w.r.t. the pros, cons and features of ELK, let's dive into our first implementation (integration of Windows Server with ELK)





For testing purpose, I have created a 14 day free trial that ELK offers.





  • Go to https://elastic.co
  • Select Try Free








  • Scroll down to find ElasticSearch and Click Launch on Elastic Cloud.
  • It should ask for email details which needs to be verified.
  • Create a Deployment.
  • My deployment details are as below:




Elasticsearch Deployment




Click on the deployment to check the Cloud ID. Save this somewhere as this will be very crucial to direct traffic from endpoints to this Cloud Tenant





Now, once the Cloud tenant is ready, let us install Winlogbeat on our Windows server to send Windows event logs to Kibana (ELK's GUI)





Winlogbeat installation





  1. Download Winlogbeat from https://www.elastic.co/products/beats/winlogbeat
  2. Extract the contents of the zip file to C:\Program Files and rename this extracted folder as Winlogbeat.
  3. With the account privileges of Administrator, install Winlogbeat as follows:




  • cd "C:\Program Files\Winlogbeat"
  • .\ install-service-winlogbeat.ps1




In case of issues with Powershell rejecting code execution use the following command. The error message, command and successful installation, in my case, is as per the below excerpt.





Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Scope CurrentUser









Once the installation is successful, modify the C:\Program Files\Winlogbeat\winlogbeat.yml file to establish the connection with Elastic Cloud tenant we created above.





Scroll down and un-comment: "cloud-id" to enter the following:





  • cloud.id: "Deployment:Cloud ID"
  • cloud.auth: "username:<password>"




I have masked the Cloud ID and password details for my deployment (Deployment-1)





Can be found in : C:\Program Files\Winlogbeat




winlogbeat.yml modification




Enter the following commands in Powershell to load Kibana dashboards.









The setup is ready.. Check on Kibana if the Windows Event logs are getting populated in Kibana. The logs can be found by clicking on the compass icon in the left tray of Kibana.





Windows Event logs in Kibana




And voila.. we have integrated Windows server with Elasticsearch..


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