Why install Metricbeat as a Windows Service?

Elastic Stack Beats
1

The installation instructions on the main Metricbeat download page are straight forward:

  1. Download and unzip Metricbeat
  2. Edit the metricbeat.yml configuration file
  3. Start the daemon by running ./metricbeat -e -c metricbeat.yml (with admin privileges)

The Getting Started Guide's installation instructions are a little more complicated. It has you run a powershell script that sets up Metricbeat as a Window's service.

Could someone explain the pros and cons of both methods?

2

The benefit to running it as a service is that Metricbeat will automatically start when the OS boots and will run in the background.