Hey @tbhaxor,
To configure dashboards, Beats only need access to Kibana, for that you can run auditbeat setup --dashboards.
For other steps of the setup, Beats need direct access to Elasticsearch, if you want to setup also ILM you will need to run at least once auditbeat setup with auditbeat configured with Elasticsearch as output.
If nothing works for you, could you please share your auditbeat configuration, and the version you are using?