Product release

Elastic Stack 5.3.0 Released

By
Tyler Hannan

Editor's Note (August 3, 2021): This post uses deprecated features. Please reference the map custom regions with reverse geocoding documentation for current instructions.

Say ‘Heya!’ to 5.3.0

It is, again, a substantive release with features and functionality in nearly all areas of the Elastic Stack. And, as per usual, it is available -- right now -- on Elastic Cloud.

Bonus time: Encryption-at-rest has been a highly requested feature for our customers wrestling with compliance regulations or strict internal policies. After many moons of testing and evaluating options, we’re happy to announce that we now support encryption at rest via dm-crypt! The key factors in selecting this approach were performance, stability, and reliability - in our benchmarks, we observed a mere 2-5% performance overhead, and our comprehensive test suite will be run continuously with encryption-at-rest enabled. For now, this support applies to self-hosted clusters, not to Elastic Cloud, but stay tuned, encryption fans.

… and now, back to your regularly scheduled program:

Elasticsearch

For more detailed information, and many other features, peruse the Elasticsearch detail post.

  • How does one search across multiple clusters? Well, one could use cross-cluster search.
  • Need to perform query-time grouping? You’ll love the new field collapsing feature.
  • Have you been confused by the differences between the highlighters? You’ll love the new unified highlighter: one highlighter to rule them all.

Kibana

‘Visualize’ all the features, and ‘Discover’ more information in the detail post.

  • The top hits aggregation lets you visualize the ‘latest’ metric in a series of documents
  • We love the timepicker. We love even more how it automatically closes after selection and lets you use arrows to quickly navigate forward and backward in time
  • Discovering data is simpler than ever with the ability to highlight documents and filter on document table values

When we introduced the Elastic Tile Service, we supported 10 levels of zoom. Now, X-Pack Basic users can zoom to level 18. Install X-Pack to get started.

Logstash

Many highly requested features make an appearance in this release. For more information, grok the detail post.

  • Ever wish you could enrich Logstash events with your database data? We’re proud to introduce new database lookup enrichment capabilities with the JDBC_Streaming filter! Additionally, the Elasticsearch filter is now an Elastic supported plugin.
  • Persistent queues are still beta, but your feedback has made them even better. Now featuring guaranteed at-least-once delivery semantics.
  • New integrations to ingest from Google PubSub and output to Monasca. For more processing fun, we’ve also added the age and emoji filters.

In 5.2 we released the monitoring UI for Logstash. In 5.3, we’ve added cgroup information and persistent queue stats And, of course, the features are included in the X-Pack basic license for free, so install X-Pack to get started.

Beats

We don’t ‘let the beat drop’ but we drop the updates in a detail post.

  • ‘Simple things should be simple.’ - Most Elasticians. Filebeat modules make getting started with the Elastic Stack truly simple(r).
  • Changing configuration across all your prospectors or modules no longer requires a restart with dynamic configuration reloading.

ES-Hadoop

ES-Hadoop 5.3.0 has also been released today. This version adds unicode support for index and type names and custom HTTP header support.

Get It Now!