# Load index template for beats upgrade
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/load-index-template-for-beats-upgrade/294078
**Category:** Beats
**Tags:** filebeat, winlogbeat
**Created:** [January 11, 2022, 8:49pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/load-index-template-for-beats-upgrade/294078 "2022-01-11T20:49:30Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Dennis\_Qian](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/Dennis_Qian)
#### Post date: [January 11, 2022, 8:49pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/load-index-template-for-beats-upgrade/294078/1 "2022-01-11T20:49:30Z")
I need to upgrade filebeat 6.8 to 7.16 and winlogbeat 6.3 to 7.16. After reading the upgrade guide, my understanding is that I need to upgrade winlogbeat to 6.8 first, then load index template.
However our beats output to logstash, not elaticsearch. Do we still load index template? How can I do that when we don't have a running Elasticsearch cluster?
Thank you.
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### Author:  [@legoguy1000](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/legoguy1000)
#### Post date: [January 11, 2022, 9:59pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/load-index-template-for-beats-upgrade/294078/2 "2022-01-11T21:59:37Z")
The templates are for Elasticsearch so if ur not using Elasticsearch you don't need to worry about it.
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### Author:  [@andrewkroh](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/andrewkroh)
#### Post date: [January 12, 2022, 1:08am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/load-index-template-for-beats-upgrade/294078/3 "2022-01-12T01:08:35Z")
Similarly, since you are not using ES you can skip upgrading to 6.8 and go direct to 7.16. If you have an Logstash pipelines you might need to adjust some of your processing to account for new field names.
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### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2022, 3:09am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/load-index-template-for-beats-upgrade/294078/4 "2022-02-09T03:09:31Z")
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