Filebeat is able to automatically install the required ingest pipelines when it has Elasticsearch as output.

Since filebeat 6.3.0 filebeat setup is able to install pipelines using the --pipelines flag, this allows to install the pipelines by an operator when filebeats don't have Elasticsearch as output (in architectures with logstash, kafka...).

There is documentation in the guide about installing index templates and kibana dashboards, but not about pipelines, and it can be difficult to know when it is needed to do it manually and how to do it.