No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it

Thank you for jumping in Leandro and Andrew. As it turns out my problem had to do with the fact that my system is not built as a cluster, but is a small, all-in-one system.

Marc54g on Elasticsearch's slack channel got me pointed in the right direction. I needed to add the line discovery.type: single-node to my elasticsearch.yml file, as well as change the network.host entry to 0.0.0.0.

After that the data just started pouring in. I just needed to walk through setting up the index patterns and Viola'! I have data to search!

Thanks again to Leandro and Andrew for stepping in to help, and to everyone who read my request for help as well.