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Ingest data to Elastic Security

Learn how to add your own data to Elastic Security.

To ingest data, you can use:

  • The Elastic Agent with the Elastic Defend integration, which protects your hosts and sends logs, metrics, and endpoint security data to Elastic Security. See Install and configure the Elastic Defend integration.

  • The Elastic Agent with other integrations, which are available in the Elastic Package Registry (EPR). To install an integration that works with Elastic Security, select Add integrations in the toolbar on most pages. On the Integrations page, select the Security category filter, then select an integration to view the installation instructions. For more information on integrations, refer to Integrations.

  • Beats shippers installed for each system you want to monitor.

  • The Elastic Agent to send data from Splunk to Elastic Security. See Get started with data from Splunk.

  • Third-party collectors configured to ship ECS-compliant data. Elastic Security ECS field reference provides a list of ECS fields used in Elastic Security.

Important

If you use a third-party collector to ship data to Elastic Security, you must map its fields to the Elastic Common Schema (ECS). Additionally, you must add its index to the Elastic Security indices (update the securitySolution:defaultIndex advanced setting).

Elastic Security uses the host.name ECS field as the primary key for identifying hosts.

The Elastic Agent with the Elastic Defend integration ships these data sources:

  • Process - Linux, macOS, Windows
  • Network - Linux, macOS, Windows
  • File - Linux, macOS, Windows
  • DNS - Windows
  • Registry - Windows
  • DLL and Driver Load - Windows
  • Security - Windows

Install Beats shippers

To add hosts and populate Elastic Security with network security events, you need to install and configure Beats on the hosts from which you want to ingest security events:

  • Filebeat for forwarding and centralizing logs and files

  • Auditbeat for collecting security events

  • Winlogbeat for centralizing Windows event logs

  • Packetbeat for analyzing network activity

You can install Beats using the UI guide or directly from the command line.

Install Beats using the UI guide

When you add integrations that use Beats, you're guided through the Beats installation process. To begin, go to the Integrations page (select Add integrations in the toolbar on most pages), and then follow the links for the types of data you want to collect.

Tip

On the Integrations page, you can select the Beats only filter to only view integrations using Beats.

Download and install Beats from the command line

To install Beats, see these installation guides:

Enable modules and configuration options

No matter how you installed Beats, you need to enable modules in Auditbeat and Filebeat to populate Elastic Security with data.

Tip

For a full list of security-related beat modules, click here.

To populate Hosts data, enable these modules:

To populate Network data, enable Packetbeat protocols and Filebeat modules:

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