Enhanced monitoring of Amazon EKS with Elastic add-on capabilities

Modern cloud-native applications are dynamic and distributed. Traditional monitoring tools often struggle to keep up. Elastic Agent, managed by Fleet, provides:

• Unified data collection: Logs, metrics, and security events in one place

• Scalability: Runs as a DaemonSet, so every EKS node is covered

• Centralized management: Configure and update agents from a single UI in Kibana

• Powerful visualizations: Use Kibana to explore and analyze your Kubernetes data

The Elastic Agent EKS add-on is deployed as a DaemonSet, ensuring that each Kubernetes node in the EKS cluster runs a pod with the Elastic Agent. Since DaemonSets are managed by the Kubernetes control plane, EKS automatically ensures that an instance of the pod is running on every node. The Elastic Agent EKS add-on can be further customized based on configuration parameters equivalent to those provided in the Elastic Agent Helm chart, allowing users to tailor the deployment to their specific observability and security requirements.

• An existing Amazon EKS cluster (Need help? AWS docs have you covered.)

• Elasticsearch and Kibana for storing and visualizing your data (The fastest way is to use Elastic Cloud, which runs on AWS, GCP, or Azure.)

You can add the Elastic Agent as an EKS add-on using the AWS Console, eksctl, or AWS CLI. Here’s a high-level overview:

• Choose the Elastic Agent version you want.

• Get the Fleet URL and Enrollment Token from your Elastic Cloud deployment (or self-managed Elastic Stack).

• Configure the add-on with these values:

• In the AWS EKS Console, the Elastic Agent add-on should show as Active.

• In Kibana, go to Management > Fleet > Agents. Your EKS nodes should appear as enrolled agents.

• Log in to your Elastic Cloud account.

• Open the Kibana endpoint for your deployment.

• Use prebuilt dashboards or build custom visualizations to monitor cluster health, pod metrics, and more.

The Elastic Agent offers a robust observability solution for Amazon EKS, enabling confident workload monitoring. Despite certain limitations inherent to the managed EKS environment, its unified data collection and advanced analytics capabilities position it as a leading option for contemporary DevOps practices.

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