Delay Start of Beats as Windows Service

[urso]

According to golang/go#23479 go based service can hang and time out on startup while Windows is Booting. The main Function might not even be executed in this time span.

Configuring delayed auto startup seems to resolve the issue. Setting the registry key HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\<service name>\DelayedAutostart to 1 will mark the process as delayed. Some Windows versions seem to support a per service delay setting via HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\<service name>\AutoStartDelay (DWORD in seconds).

When installing beats as services on Windows, we should enable Delayed Autostart and try to set the delay to 60s (default is 120s).

[andrewkroh]

To implement this we need to add some PowerShell scripting to install-service.ps1 that sets the registry keys associated with the service. Then do some testing to make sure that it works across Windows versions.

[rwaight]

Since we are using PowerShell to create a service, we can use PowerShell to set it to delayed start after creating the service. For filebeat, this would be something like:

$svcDelayed='config "{0}" start=delayed-auto' -f 'filebeat'
Start-Process -FilePath sc.exe -ArgumentList $svcDelayed

You could obviously pass whatever service when you declare $svcDelayed

Please let me know if you would like some help with this, thanks!