I remember before I installed logstash as a service I'd start it command line which was great for testing. Now as a service I'm not sure how to test with output going to the console. I have this installed using the PPA for Ubuntu. Any help would be wonderful...thank you.
Put your config files(*.conf) into /etc/logstash/conf.d, and run /opt/logstash/bin/logstash -f /etc/logstash/conf.d.
That did the trick...thank you.