I changed the stream rules to ’Field full_message must contain <Channel>Setup</Channel>' in the full message from ’Field System_Channel must contain Setup' and it worked. Not sure why though.
The extractor configuration was a Grok Pattern on the full message for ’<TimeCreated SystemTime=%{QUOTEDSTRING}>' which worked fine once I got the stream working. I used regex as recommended here (Pipeline rule date parse) to create a rule for the pipeline which is working as well.
Am I correct in assuming that an incorrect pipeline would cause the error org.graylog2.periodical.NodePingThread - Did not find meta info of this node. Re-registering? I checked and the time was synced.