Step 5: 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 and rpm:

sudo service filebeat start

docker:

See Running Filebeat on Docker.

mac and linux:

sudo chown root filebeat.yml 
sudo ./filebeat -e

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.

brew:

To have launchd start elastic/tap/filebeat and then restart it at login, run:

brew services start elastic/tap/filebeat-full

To run Filebeat in the foreground instead of running it as a background service, run:

filebeat -e

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.