Load Kibana dashboardsedit

Winlogbeat comes packaged with example Kibana dashboards, visualizations, and searches for visualizing Winlogbeat data in Kibana. Before you can use the dashboards, you need to create the index pattern, winlogbeat-*, and load the dashboards into Kibana.

To do this, you can either run the setup command (as described here) or configure dashboard loading in the winlogbeat.yml config file. This requires a Kibana endpoint configuration. If you didn’t already configure a Kibana endpoint, see Kibana endpoint.

Load dashboardsedit

Make sure Kibana is running before you perform this step. If you are accessing a secured Kibana instance, make sure you’ve configured credentials as described in the Quick start: installation and configuration.

To load the recommended index template for writing to Elasticsearch and deploy the sample dashboards for visualizing the data in Kibana, use the command that works with your system.

winlogbeat setup --dashboards

For more options, such as loading customized dashboards, see Importing Existing Beat Dashboards. If you’ve configured the Logstash output, see Load dashboards for Logstash output.

Load dashboards for Logstash outputedit

During dashboard loading, Winlogbeat connects to Elasticsearch to check version information. To load dashboards when the Logstash output is enabled, you need to temporarily disable the Logstash output and enable Elasticsearch. To connect to a secured Elasticsearch cluster, you also need to pass Elasticsearch credentials.

The example shows a hard-coded password, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore.

winlogbeat setup -e \
  -E output.logstash.enabled=false \
  -E output.elasticsearch.hosts=['localhost:9200'] \
  -E output.elasticsearch.username=winlogbeat_internal \
  -E output.elasticsearch.password=YOUR_PASSWORD \
  -E setup.kibana.host=localhost:5601