Looking for a reliably stable Metricbeat version for Windows Server 2008 / 2008 R2

Elastic Stack Beats
1

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice on which Metricbeat version is known to run reliably on Windows Server 2003, Windows server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

I’m fully aware that these operating systems are EOL and no longer supported, but unfortunately at the moment I don’t have the option to upgrade them. Given these constraints, I’d really appreciate any recommendations based on experience — specifically, versions that have proven stable in similar legacy environments.

Thanks in advance for any insights or suggestions!

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According to the support matrix, the last supported version was 7.17.X

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Please describe what you want to monitor on those host? Windows performance disk, cpu, processes, event log, etc?
Do you want to monitor applications/services?

The best way is to test. I don't see any reason why MB wouldn't work at least on Win 2008. Elastic declared on which platforms has been tested products. Windows 2003 a long time ago reached EOL however it supports PS 2.0. Who will go in the past to test something which is rarely used?

Anyway check the MB documentation, MB use WMI/WQL to get metric which means you get performance counters on any Windows server. This is good side because you can us it as well.
In case that MB is not supported, again you have:

  • OSquery, hope it's work
  • Powershell and ES APIs, by using WMI in PS and methods ConvertTo-Json & Invoke-RestMethod give you ability to submit any data to ES.There is also At beginning will be at little bit confusing however it's custom make, just need a time or just ask chatgpt, perplexity etc. to generate you the .ps script for your monitoring performance list
  • Any other (old) monitoring tool which can send results to ES API or syslog or log or SNMP or TCP,....
    Maaaybe you can even use OpenTelemetry or at least Heartbeat for ICMP, TCP and HTTP.
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Hi all,

Not ideal running these old systems :sweat_smile:, but as we say here, “you hang the donkey wherever the owner wants.” After some tinkering, here’s what I found:

  • Metricbeat 5.2 on Windows Server 2003

  • Metricbeat 6.18.19, 7.17.16, and Elastic Agent 8.10.4 on Windows Server 2008 R2

All of them start up fine and even try to connect to a backend. I haven’t been able to test sending actual metrics, but it looks like they could work in a real scenario.

Hopefully this saves someone some trial and error!

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