Step 6: Start Filebeatedit

Start Filebeat by issuing the appropriate command for your platform. If you are accessing a secured Elasticsearch cluster, make sure you’ve configured credentials as described in Step 2: Configure Filebeat.

If you use an init.d script to start Filebeat on deb or rpm, you can’t specify command line flags (see Command reference). To specify flags, start Filebeat in the foreground.

deb:

sudo service filebeat start

rpm:

sudo service filebeat start

docker:

docker run docker.elastic.co/beats/filebeat:6.4.3

mac:

sudo chown root filebeat.yml 
sudo ./filebeat -e -c filebeat.yml -d "publish"

You’ll be running Filebeat as root, so you need to change ownership of the configuration file, or run Filebeat with --strict.perms=false specified. See Config File Ownership and Permissions in the Beats Platform Reference.

win:

PS C:\Program Files\Filebeat> Start-Service filebeat

By default, Windows log files are stored in C:\ProgramData\filebeat\Logs.

Filebeat is now ready to send log files to your defined output.