Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.8.0 released with several new TLS certificate monitoring and alerting features

<p>We are pleased to announce the release of Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.8.0 — available&nbsp;on&nbsp;<a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a>, or when you <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">download</a> the Elastic Stack. This release brings several TLS certificate monitoring and alerting features.
</p><strong><h2>New certificate-focused capabilities in 7.8</h2></strong><p>One of the main use cases of Elastic Uptime and Heartbeat is managing large deployments of servers or containers. Heartbeat has automatically captured some information about TLS certificates for a while. And when I say automatic, I mean other than pointing Heartbeat at the URL or endpoint to be monitored, Uptime users didn’t have to do any additional configuration or work to automatically start monitoring the certificates.&nbsp;
</p><p>Several releases ago, Uptime added a small visual indicator within the details page for each monitor that showed how long it was before the certificate for that monitored URL would expire. This was really useful context, but it wasn’t the most efficient way of coming in to solve the problem of “What certificates do I have and when do I need to do something to renew them?” — especially for users with larger numbers of monitors.
</p><p>To help solve this problem, we are very excited to announce that we’ve improved Heartbeat and also added four key areas of certificate-focused capability to the Uptime app in 7.8.&nbsp;
</p><ol>
	<li>The first improvement is <strong>calling out the certificate expiration</strong> on the Monitors Overview page in a dedicated column — great for that “at-a-glance” view of your monitors and which ones may need attention.&nbsp;</li>
	<li>The second thing we did was create<strong> a new “certificate focused” view within Uptime</strong>: a single source of truth for all of your certificates on monitored URLs and endpoints. Instead of a listing of monitors, we have created a listing of every single certificate, their status, which monitors it’s related to, who the issuing authority is, when it is valid to, and how old it is, as well as exposing the SHA1 and SHA256 fingerprints in a single view.&nbsp;</li>
	<li>The third thing we built was the <strong>ability to specify your own expiration threshold. </strong>This determines how far away from expiration we highlight your certificate as being “about to expire.”&nbsp;As a bit of future proofing, we’ve also enabled setting an upper threshold for age as some browsers, like Safari and Mobile Safari, will begin to mark a certificate as invalid if it’s too old, even if it’s still technically valid.&nbsp;</li>
	<li>And finally, to expand on the fantastic Kibana alerting capabilities that shipped in 7.7, we can<strong> alert you if you’ve got a certificate that’s about to expire</strong>. Uptime will automatically configure the alert based on that expiration threshold you have in settings. This way, if you get an alert and go into the Uptime portal, the conditions will match.</li>
</ol><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt1bcf9efea75262ce/5ee123ec62faa431789710b0/tls-monitoring.gif" data-sys-asset-uid="blt1bcf9efea75262ce" alt="tls-monitoring.gif">
</p><strong><h2>Why does certificate monitoring matter?</h2></strong><p>Certificates, often interchangeably referred to as SSL certificates, TLS certificates, or more accurately, X.509 certificates, are small data files that cryptographically bind a domain, server, or hostname to an organizational identity or location. They are most commonly found securing encrypted communication from a web server to a browser. They also have a defined valid lifespan and must be renewed.<strong> </strong>If they are not renewed, an expired certificate can cause a series of cascading errors that will prevent services that require secure connections from working properly. Although expired certificates are a totally preventable problem,&nbsp;that doesn’t stop them from causing issues.&nbsp;
</p><p>As systems move from monolithic structures to microservice architecture, there’s an ever-increasing volume of certificates to manage. A 2019 survey of CIOs from the US, UK, France, Germany, and Australia found that 60% of their organizations had experienced a certificate-related outage that impacted critical business applications or services within the last year.&nbsp;
</p><p>A recent high-profile outage in February 2020 involved an expired certificate on an authentication server that Microsoft used to power their Teams app. It took over eight hours to fully restore the service. While this outage was inconvenient and probably cancelled a few meetings, sometimes these outages can be critical. In November 2018, an expired certificate in a key piece of network management software used by a major mobile phone carrier in the UK resulted in a cascading series of failures that took out all voice, data, and SMS service for nearly 24 hours. This impacted not only their customers but also those of every Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) that used the network. All told, over 32 million customers had no use of their mobile phones. As many people no longer have landlines, being unable to use a mobile phone as a lifeline in an emergency or as an outside connection in the middle of a global pandemic lockdown can have a potentially devastating impact.
</p><p>When you look at this problem and the potential impact, it’s clear why we wanted to help our users know what certificates they have deployed, when they expire, and to proactively alert them to when this is about to occur.
</p><strong><h2>Want to see it in action?</h2></strong><p>You can access the latest version of the Elastic Uptime application on <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a> on Elastic Cloud by creating a new cluster, upgrading an existing cluster the day of release, or by <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">downloading</a> the Elastic Stack.
</p><strong><h2>Related blogs</h2></strong><ul>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-observability-7-8-0-released">Elastic Observability 7.8 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-logs-7-8-0-released">Elastic Logs 7.8 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-metrics-7-8-0-released">Elastic Metrics 7.8 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-apm-7-8-0-released">Elastic APM 7.8 released</a></li>
</ul>

uptime-blog-banner.png

uptime-blog-thumb.png

Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.8.0 released

Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.7.0 released with alerting, anomaly detection and more

<p>We are pleased to announce the release of Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.7.0, available on the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a>, or when you <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">download</a> the Elastic Stack. This release is absolutely chock full of new features that our users have been asking for and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on them. Let’s dive into what’s new!
</p> <strong><h2>Monitor status alerting</h2></strong><p>Uptime has always been fantastic at leveraging the simple yet powerful nature of Heartbeat to tell if your monitored website or endpoint is up or down as well as how long it takes for a response to come back and displaying those test results in the Uptime app. With the 7.7 release, we’re supercharging these capabilities by proactively alerting you if your monitors are down! Simply click the “Alerts” button in Uptime to get started. Alerts can be viewed in Kibana as well as through dedicated integrations with Slack and PagerDuty or they can be sent via standard webhooks or email. This is the first of many alerting capabilities that we’ll be bringing to Uptime and we think you’re going to really like it!&nbsp;
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltbad3a9e3bac98d64/5e98b15d461e697539f24051/image5.gif" data-sys-asset-uid="bltbad3a9e3bac98d64" alt="image5.gif"></p><strong><h2>Response duration anomaly detection</h2></strong><p>Let’s face it, as much as I would like to imagine our users spend all of their time doing nothing but looking for variations in their response duration charts within Uptime, my instinct (and a fair amount of user research) says that this is not true! We’re all busy and Uptime is a small part of your overall toolset. With this in mind, we’ve leveraged the power of our Elastic machine learning engine to watch the response durations for all of the geographic locations in each monitor. When an anomaly is detected, we’ll highlight it on the chart so you can spend less time measuring changes and more time detecting potential service-impacting issues.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltd93fd425d8539da3/5e98b17b5ce5f45edfe36381/image3.gif" data-sys-asset-uid="bltd93fd425d8539da3" alt="image3.gif"><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt35cfd527fe90dda7/5e98b19bdb670a7472e0b796/image4.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt35cfd527fe90dda7" alt="image4.png"></p><p><br></p><strong><h2>Custom index patterns and cross-cluster search support</h2></strong><p>The team has been very excited to see the continuing growth of Uptime adoption. One request that has come out of this growth is for Uptime to support custom index patterns and, by extension, cross-cluster search. With the 7.7 release of Uptime, you can now specify custom index patterns. To get started, click on the new Settings button on the Monitors overview page in Uptime.&nbsp;</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt9a2a9a2bf3786645/5e98b1ce5c372a5f9c0ff1c8/image2.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt9a2a9a2bf3786645" alt="image2.png"></p><p><br></p><strong><h2>Choose how many monitors to display at one time&nbsp;</h2></strong><p>If you’ve been following the development of Uptime, you may have noticed that we’re sprucing the place up a bit! One big area of improvement has been on the Monitors Overview page. It’s a lot easier to read and consume essential data with a single glance. Unfortunately, we made a fairly obvious omission when we updated the list of monitors and set the default pagination to ten monitors with no way to display more in a single view. This resulted in more empty white space than the Arctic after a snowstorm on bigger monitors. Mea culpa. In 7.7, you can choose how many monitors you want to see displayed by default.<br></p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt2cb8ab734c790744/5e98b1d987cf27402a57e019/image1.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt2cb8ab734c790744" alt="image1.png"></p><p><br></p><strong><h2>Want to see it in action?</h2></strong><p>You can access the latest version of the Elastic Uptime app on the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a> on Elastic Cloud by creating a new cluster, or upgrading an existing cluster the day of release, or you can <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">download</a> the Elastic Stack.
</p> <strong><h2>Related blogs</h2></strong><ul>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-observability-7-7-0-released">Elastic Observability 7.7 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-logs-7-7-0-released">Elastic Logs 7.7 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-metrics-7-7-0-released">Elastic Metrics 7.7 released</a></li>
<li><a href="/blog/elastic-apm-7-7-0-released">Elastic APM 7.7 released</a></li>
</ul>

Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.7.0 released with alerting, anomaly detection, and more

Elastic Uptime 7.6.0 brings a whole new way to visualise your Heartbeat monitors in multiple geographic locations along with support for filtering by tags.

<p>We are pleased to announce the release of Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.6.0 — available on the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a>, or as part of the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">default distribution</a> of the Elastic Stack. This release brings a whole new way to visualize your Heartbeat monitors in multiple geographic locations, a quick and simple way to view the latest test runs per monitor by geographic location, as well as support for filtering monitors by tags within Uptime.&nbsp;
</p><h2>Details status panel and&nbsp;world map</h2><p>This is a big improvement to Elastic Uptime and will be especially welcome to all of our users with Heartbeat monitors running from different geographic locations. Our new world map allows an “at-a-glance” way to see the status of your monitors without having to dig into individual test results.
</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltf393335c85052238/5e3c4d8cc43f006b46272a60/image1.png" data-sys-asset-uid="bltf393335c85052238" alt="image1.png"></p><h2>Monitor list expanded view</h2><p>It is now possible to click on a monitor from the Monitor Overview page and see the most recent status by location. This condensed view helps you quickly and succinctly understand the performance of a given monitor from wherever you have Heartbeat configured.&nbsp;</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/bltd9a856b8180eddd0/5e3c4db2e029072f7b62a358/image2.png" data-sys-asset-uid="bltd9a856b8180eddd0" alt="image2.png"><br></p><h2>Support for tags and tag filters</h2><p>With this release, you are able to filter the test results in Uptime by tags. This is especially useful for users with large Heartbeat deployments. Use tags to focus on what you need, when you need it.</p><p><img src="https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltefdd0b53724fa2ce/blt1e052f360b5edf84/5e3c4dd55189ac6817e5fb58/image3.png" data-sys-asset-uid="blt1e052f360b5edf84" alt="image3.png"><br>
</p><h2>Want to see it in action?</h2><p>You can access the latest version of the Elastic Uptime application on the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/cloud/elasticsearch-service">Elasticsearch Service</a> on Elastic Cloud, or you can download it as part of the <a href="https://www.elastic.co/downloads/">default distribution</a> of the Elastic Stack. Download <a href="https://www.elastic.co/beats/heartbeat">Heartbeat</a>, follow the instructions on how to set it up, and start monitoring your applications and services today.
</p><h2>Related blogs</h2><ul>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-observability-7-6-0-released">Elastic Observability 7.6 released</a></li>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-logs-7-6-0-released">Elastic Logs 7.6 released</a></li>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-metrics-7-6-0-released">Elastic Metrics 7.6 released</a></li>
	<li><a href="/blog/elastic-apm-7-6-0-released">Elastic APM 7.6 released</a></li>
</ul>

Articles by Drew Post

Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.8.0 released

Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.7.0 released with alerting, anomaly detection, and more

Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.6.0 released

Products & Solutions

Company

Resources

Featured topics

News

Articles by Drew Post

Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.8.0 released

Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.7.0 released with alerting, anomaly detection, and more

Elastic Uptime Monitoring 7.6.0 released