Most Wazuh guides are written from the Linux side. The Windows agent behaves differently in a few ways that matter, especially around permissions and event channels.
I wrote a practical guide covering the deployment end to end.
What the agent gives you
- Event log collection. Security, System, Application, and the channels you explicitly add. This is where most of the useful signal lives.
- File integrity monitoring. Windows paths, registry keys, and the changes that should never happen quietly.
- Vulnerability detection. Inventory of installed software matched against the vulnerability feed.
- Active response, if you want the agent to do something rather than just report.
What it needs
- Network reachability to the manager on the agent ports
- Local administrator rights to install the service
- A decision about which event channels you actually want, because collecting everything produces volume without signal
Verifying it works
Do not trust "the service is running". Check three things:
- The agent appears as active in the dashboard.
- A test event you generate on purpose shows up in the manager within a minute.
- File integrity monitoring fires on a file you deliberately change.
If any of those fail, you have a configuration problem, not a monitoring capability.
Read it
The full guide: Deploying the Wazuh agent on Windows
The same advice as always applies: deploy to one host, prove it end to end, then roll out the rest.