Run Auditbeat on Docker

Docker images for Auditbeat are available from the Elastic Docker registry. The base image is centos:7.

A list of all published Docker images and tags is available at www.docker.elastic.co.

These images are free to use under the Elastic license. They contain open source and free commercial features and access to paid commercial features. Start a 30-day trial to try out all of the paid commercial features. See the Subscriptions page for information about Elastic license levels.

Obtaining Auditbeat for Docker is as simple as issuing a docker pull command against the Elastic Docker registry.

docker pull docker.elastic.co/beats/auditbeat:9.0.0-beta1

Alternatively, you can download other Docker images that contain only features available under the Apache 2.0 license. To download the images, go to www.docker.elastic.co.

As another option, you can use the hardened Wolfi image. Using Wolfi images requires Docker version 20.10.10 or higher. For details about why the Wolfi images have been introduced, refer to our article Reducing CVEs in Elastic container images.

docker pull docker.elastic.co/beats/auditbeat-wolfi:9.0.0-beta1

You can use the Cosign application to verify the Auditbeat Docker image signature.

wget https://artifacts.elastic.co/cosign.pub
cosign verify --key cosign.pub docker.elastic.co/beats/auditbeat:9.0.0-beta1

The cosign command prints the check results and the signature payload in JSON format:

Verification for docker.elastic.co/beats/auditbeat:9.0.0-beta1 --
The following checks were performed on each of these signatures:
  - The cosign claims were validated
  - Existence of the claims in the transparency log was verified offline
  - The signatures were verified against the specified public key

Running Auditbeat with the setup command will create the index pattern and load visualizations , dashboards, and machine learning jobs. Run this command:

docker run --rm \
  --cap-add="AUDIT_CONTROL" \
  --cap-add="AUDIT_READ" \
  docker.elastic.co/beats/auditbeat:9.0.0-beta1 \
  setup -E setup.kibana.host=kibana:5601 \
  -E output.elasticsearch.hosts=["elasticsearch:9200"] <1> 12

1. Substitute your Kibana and Elasticsearch hosts and ports.
2. If you are using the hosted Elasticsearch Service in Elastic Cloud, replace the -E output.elasticsearch.hosts line with the Cloud ID and elastic password using this syntax:

-E cloud.id=<Cloud ID from Elasticsearch Service> \
-E cloud.auth=elastic:<elastic password>

If you’d like to run Auditbeat in a Docker container on a read-only file system, you can do so by specifying the --read-only option. Auditbeat requires a stateful directory to store application data, so with the --read-only option you also need to use the --mount option to specify a path to where that data can be stored.

For example:

docker run --rm \
  --mount type=bind,source=$(pwd)/data,destination=/usr/share/auditbeat/data \
  --read-only \
  docker.elastic.co/beats/auditbeat:9.0.0-beta1

The Docker image provides several methods for configuring Auditbeat. The conventional approach is to provide a configuration file via a volume mount, but it’s also possible to create a custom image with your configuration included.

Download this example configuration file as a starting point:

curl -L -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/elastic/beats/master/deploy/docker/auditbeat.docker.yml

One way to configure Auditbeat on Docker is to provide auditbeat.docker.yml via a volume mount. With docker run, the volume mount can be specified like this.

docker run -d \
  --name=auditbeat \
  --user=root \
  --volume="$(pwd)/auditbeat.docker.yml:/usr/share/auditbeat/auditbeat.yml:ro" \
  --cap-add="AUDIT_CONTROL" \
  --cap-add="AUDIT_READ" \
  --pid=host \
  docker.elastic.co/beats/auditbeat:9.0.0-beta1 -e \
  --strict.perms=false \
  -E output.elasticsearch.hosts=["elasticsearch:9200"] <1> 12

1. Substitute your Elasticsearch hosts and ports.
2. If you are using the hosted Elasticsearch Service in Elastic Cloud, replace the -E output.elasticsearch.hosts line with the Cloud ID and elastic password using the syntax shown earlier.

The auditbeat.docker.yml downloaded earlier should be customized for your environment. See Configure for more details. Edit the configuration file and customize it to match your environment then re-deploy your Auditbeat container.

It’s possible to embed your Auditbeat configuration in a custom image. Here is an example Dockerfile to achieve this:

FROM docker.elastic.co/beats/auditbeat:9.0.0-beta1
COPY auditbeat.yml /usr/share/auditbeat/auditbeat.yml

Under Docker, Auditbeat runs as a non-root user, but requires some privileged capabilities to operate correctly. Ensure that the AUDIT_CONTROL and AUDIT_READ capabilities are available to the container.

It is also essential to run Auditbeat in the host PID namespace.

docker run --cap-add=AUDIT_CONTROL --cap-add=AUDIT_READ --user=root --pid=host docker.elastic.co/beats/auditbeat:9.0.0-beta1