In old kernels (~2.6.20) beats fail to start with a message like this:
FATAL: kernel too old
/bin/bash: line 1: 5496 Segmentation fault /usr/share/metricbeat/bin/metricbeat-god -r / -n -p /var/run/metricbeat.pid -- /usr/share/metricbeat/bin/metricbeat -c /etc/metricbeat/metricbeat.yml -path.home /usr/share/metricbeat -path.config /etc/metricbeat -path.data /var/lib/metricbeat -path.logs /var/log/metricbeat
[FAILED]
You can replace original /etc/init.d/metricbeat file with this script to run metricbeat in old Red Hat systems. After replacing the file run checkconfig --add metricbeat
so metricbeat starts automatically with every system start.