== Winlogbeat Overview

++++
<titleabbrev>Overview</titleabbrev>
++++

Winlogbeat ships Windows event logs to Elasticsearch or Logstash. You can
install it as a Windows service.

Winlogbeat reads from one or more event logs using Windows APIs, filters the
events based on user-configured criteria, then sends the event data to the
configured outputs (Elasticsearch or Logstash). Winlogbeat watches the event
logs so that new event data is sent in a timely manner. The read position for
each event log is persisted to disk to allow Winlogbeat to resume after
restarts.

Winlogbeat can capture event data from any event logs running on your system.
For example, you can capture events such as:

* application events
* hardware events
* security events
* system events

Winlogbeat is a https://www.elastic.co/products/beats[Beat], and it is based on
the libbeat framework. General information about libbeat and how to
set up Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana are covered in the
{libbeat}/index.html[Beats Platform Reference].
