Well, progress made, discovered the stack is misconfigured internally, just trying to find the right configuration file now. when I tail logstash.log I get the following.
{:timestamp=>"2017-07-18T11:58:15.016000-0700", :message=>"Attempted to send a bulk request to Elasticsearch configured at '["http://localhost:9200/"]', but Elasticsearch appears to be unreachable or down!", :error_message=>"Connection refused (Connection refused)", :class=>"Manticore::SocketException", :client_config=>{:hosts=>["http://localhost:9200/"], :ssl=>nil, :transport_options=>{:socket_timeout=>0, :request_timeout=>0, :proxy=>nil, :ssl=>{}}, :transport_class=>Elasticsearch::Transport::Transport::HTTP::Manticore, :logger=>nil, :tracer=>nil, :reload_connections=>false, :retry_on_failure=>false, :reload_on_failure=>false, :randomize_hosts=>false}, :level=>:error}
{:timestamp=>"2017-07-18T11:58:15.035000-0700", :message=>"Attempted to send a bulk request to Elasticsearch configured at '["http://localhost:9200/"]', but Elasticsearch appears to be unreachable or down!", :error_message=>"Connection refused (Connection refused)", :class=>"Manticore::SocketException", :client_config=>{:hosts=>["http://localhost:9200/"], :ssl=>nil, :transport_options=>{:socket_timeout=>0, :request_timeout=>0, :proxy=>nil, :ssl=>{}}, :transport_class=>Elasticsearch::Transport::Transport::HTTP::Manticore, :logger=>nil, :tracer=>nil, :reload_connections=>false, :retry_on_failure=>false, :reload_on_failure=>false, :randomize_hosts=>false}, :level=>:error}
{:timestamp=>"2017-07-18T11:58:15.036000-0700", :message=>"Attempted to send a bulk request to Elasticsearch configured at '["http://localhost:9200/"]', but Elasticsearch appears to be unreachable or down!", :error_message=>"Connection refused (Connection refused)", :class=>"Manticore::SocketException", :client_config=>{:hosts=>["http://localhost:9200/"], :ssl=>nil, :transport_options=>{:socket_timeout=>0, :request_timeout=>0, :proxy=>nil, :ssl=>{}}, :transport_class=>Elasticsearch::Transport::Transport::HTTP::Manticore, :logger=>nil, :tracer=>nil, :reload_connections=>false, :retry_on_failure=>false, :reload_on_failure=>false, :randomize_hosts=>false}, :level=>:error}
localhost needs to be swapped to an IP address, changed the .conf for input and outut in /etc/logstash/conf.d, still looking for where else it might be wrong