AI agent skills for Elastic

The elastic/agent-skills repository provides official, open-source skill packages that help AI coding agents work with the Elastic stack. Built on the Agent Skills open standard, they give agents like Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and others the specialized knowledge they need to perform Elastic-specific tasks more accurately and efficiently.

Skills cover areas such as interacting with Elasticsearch APIs, building Kibana dashboards, configuring Fleet policies, and working with Observability and Elastic Security workflows.

AI agent skills are a lightweight, open format for extending AI agent capabilities with specialized knowledge. Each skill is a self-contained folder with a SKILL.md file containing metadata and instructions.

Agents discover available skills at startup by reading their name and description fields, then load full instructions on demand when a matching task is detected.

This approach keeps agents fast by default while giving them access to deep, procedural knowledge when needed.

For more background on the standard, refer to agentskills.io.

Skills in the elastic/agent-skills repository focus on Elastic products and the Elastic stack:

• Interacting with Elasticsearch APIs (search, indexing, cluster management).
• Building and managing Kibana dashboards, saved objects, and visualizations.
• Configuring Fleet policies, Elastic Agent integrations, and Beats pipelines.
• Patterns for Observability, Elastic Security, and APM workflows.

You can install Elastic skills using the skills CLI with npx, or by cloning the elastic/agent-skills repository and running the bundled installer script. The npx method requires Node.js with npx available in your environment.

The fastest way to install skills is with the skills CLI. Run the following command to launch an interactive prompt where you can select skills and target agents:

npx skills add elastic/agent-skills
		

Install a specific skill by name:

npx skills add elastic/agent-skills --skill elasticsearch-esql
		

Or use the @ shorthand to specify the skill directly as repo@skill (equivalent to --skill):

npx skills add elastic/agent-skills@elasticsearch-esql
		

Install to specific agents:

npx skills add elastic/agent-skills -a cursor -a claude-code
		

List available skills without installing:

npx skills add elastic/agent-skills --list
		

Install all skills to all agents without prompts:

npx skills add elastic/agent-skills --all
		

If you prefer to work from a local checkout, or your environment does not have Node.js or npx, clone the repository and use the bundled bash installer:

git clone https://github.com/elastic/agent-skills.git
cd agent-skills
./scripts/install-skills.sh add -a <agent>
		

The script requires bash 3.2+ and standard Unix utilities (awk, find, cp, rm, mkdir).

The following AI coding agents are compatible with the Agent Skills format:

Skills are copied into your project or home directory at install time. When the repository is updated with new instructions, bug fixes, or additional resources, those changes are not automatically synced to your local copies.

The update process depends on how the skills were installed (npx or a local clone).

Check whether any installed skills have changed upstream:

npx skills check
		

Pull the latest versions of all installed skills:

npx skills update
		

Re-run the installer with --force to overwrite existing skills:

git pull
./scripts/install-skills.sh add -a <agent> --force
		

Without --force, the script skips skills that are already installed.

Found a problem or have a suggestion? Open an issue on the elastic/agent-skills repository.