Beats winlogbeat 8.8

Winlogbeat (part of Elastic Beats) is a lightweight, open-source shipper for Windows Event Logs. Developed by Elastic, it collects events from local or forwarded Windows log channels and reliably sends them to your chosen destination for search, analysis, and alerting—most commonly Elasticsearch or Logstash within the Elastic Stack.

Key capabilities:

• Collects from core Windows channels such as Security, Application, System, PowerShell, Sysmon, and Forwarded Events.
• Works seamlessly with Windows Event Forwarding to centralize logs from many hosts.
• Offers flexible filtering and routing, including include/exclude rules by event ID and XPath-based queries.
• Structures data using the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) and supports processors for enrichment and cleanup.
• Delivers at scale with low overhead, built-in buffering and backpressure, and optional TLS encryption.
• Outputs to Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kafka, Redis, or files, and integrates with Kibana for visualization and dashboards.

Winlogbeat helps security, IT, and compliance teams turn raw Windows events into actionable insights for threat detection, incident response, and operational troubleshooting. Configuration is straightforward via YAML, and the agent is designed to be resource-efficient for deployment across large Windows environments.

Beats winlogbeat is developed by Elastic. The most popular versions of this product among our users are: 8.4, 8.5, 8.6, 8.7 and 8.8.