Enroll Beats in central management
editEnroll Beats in central management
editYou need to enroll Beats to register them in central management and establish trust. Enrolled Beats will have the credentials needed to retrieve configurations from Kibana.
During the enrollment process:
- The Beat contacts Kibana and tries to register
- Kibana registers the Beat instance and returns an access token for configuration polling
- The enroll command creates a backup of your configuration and then overwrites the current settings so they can be managed centrally
To enroll Beats, use either token-based or username and password-based enrollment.
Prerequisites
edit-
Verify that your Elastic license includes the Beats central management feature.
Don’t have a license? You can start a 30-day trial. At the end of the trial period, you can purchase a subscription to keep using central management. For more information, see https://www.elastic.co/subscriptions and License Management.
- Enable security in Kibana to ensure that only users with sufficient privileges are able to access Beats configurations.
-
Assign the
beats_admin
role to any users who need to enroll Beats or manage configuration settings in central management. - If you plan to use the sample Kibana dashboards provided with Filebeat, load the dashboards before enrolling the Beat.
- If you plan to define module configurations in central management, set up the ingest pipelines before enrolling the Beat. For more information, see Load ingest pipelines manually.
Token-based enrollment
editToken-based enrollment is recommended if you are enrolling Beats manually.
To use token-based enrollment, go to Kibana → Management → Beats and click
Enroll Beat
. Select the Beat type and operating system, then copy and run the
command for enrolling the Beat.
The command has this format:
filebeat enroll KIBANA_URL TOKEN
-
KIBANA_URL
- The URL of the Kibana instance you will use for central management.
-
TOKEN
- The enrollment token generated by the Central Management UI. The enrollment token will expire as soon as it’s used.
For example:
filebeat enroll http://xyz.gov:5601 70f4b584e8024b96b682c46125a8d81
Repeat this process to enroll additional Beats.
Windows users: If you installed Filebeat as a service, you must also set
-path.data
to "C:\ProgramData\filebeat"
when you
run the enroll command. For example:
.\filebeat.exe enroll http://xyz.gov:5601 70f4b584e8024b96b682c46125a8d81a
-path.data "C:\ProgramData\filebeat"
Why? The service installation script, install-service-filebeat.ps1
,
changes the default data path to match the convention used for Windows. If you
run the enroll command without specifying the correct data path, Filebeat
will be enrolled in central management with the wrong UUID and unable to receive
the configuration.
Username and password-based enrollment
editYou can also enroll by specifying a username and password. This is the recommended way for scripted deploys:
filebeat enroll KIBANA_URL --username USER --password METHOD [--force]
-
--username USER
-
The username to use for password-based enrollment. The default
username is
elastic
. -
--password METHOD
-
The method to use for getting the password. Available options are:
-
env:VAR_NAME
gets the password from the environment variableVAR_NAME
-
stdin
prompts the user for a password. This is the default.
-
-
--force
- Overwrites the current settings without asking for confirmation.
For example:
filebeat enroll http://xyz.gov:5601 --username myuser --password stdin
Windows users: If you installed Filebeat as a service, you must also set
-path.data
to "C:\ProgramData\filebeat"
when you
run the enroll command. For example:
.\filebeat.exe enroll http://xyz.gov:5601 --username myuser --password stdin
-path.data "C:\ProgramData\filebeat"
Why? The service installation script, install-service-filebeat.ps1
,
changes the default data path to match the convention used for Windows. If you
run the enroll command without specifying the correct data path, Filebeat
will be enrolled in central management with the wrong UUID and unable to receive
the configuration.