On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS after default installation of Logstash - there seams to be some permission issues. for e.g
dmadmin@es01:/usr/share/logstash/bin$ ls -l /var/lib/logstash/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 10 19:12 dead_letter_queue
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Sep 10 19:12 queue
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 36 Sep 10 19:12 uuid
Above files are owned by root and not Logstash
As result you get an error when starting the service:
[2018-09-10T19:35:38,554][FATAL][logstash.runner ] An unexpected error occurred! {:error=>#<ArgumentError: Path "/var/lib/logstash/queue" must be a writable directory.
So I have changed ownership to Logstash and it got working.
However, after that I got another error:
[2018-09-10T19:46:53,936][ERROR][logstash.config.sourceloader] Could not fetch all the sources {:exception=>Errno::EACCES, :message=>"Permission denied - /etc/logstash/startup.options",
Changed ownership and it is working now.