Filebeat installation (without rpm/deb) and running without root

Elastic Stack Beats
1

Hello all

I am tasked to install and configure filebeat (yet rather unknown to me) on several servers in order to forward application logs to ELK. The server themselves will not use anything from ELK (except filebeat to forward logs, as mentioned).

Please forgive me for asking those noobish questions, however, I am somehwat lost and needs pointers:

  1. Is it possible to install filebeat without using rpm or deb packages (I am aware that this means I need to take care of startup after reboot myself)? I am unable to find a tar.gz or similar at the downloads page.

  2. Are there options to determine WHERE its files of filebeat need to be installed - either with source installation or with rpm (I'd like it to not use the default system places, but install everything from filebeat in one single specific subdirectory)?

  3. Is it possible to tell in the configuration files of filebeat which user it should run with/under? (all the logs I want to forward are already made/readable with a specific non-root systemuser, I'd like to avoid making another user and give that user access to the logs)?

Thank you for your help
Much appreciated
cheers
scheuri

2
  1. Here you can the tar.gz files for all the platforms: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/beats/filebeat
  2. If you use the unzip the tar.gz file everything is in the directory and will work out of the box assuming you run the binary from the directory.
  3. This is not a config option but depends on with which user you run Filebeat.
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