Use internal collection to send monitoring dataedit

Use internal collectors to send Beats monitoring data directly to your monitoring cluster.

To learn about monitoring in general, see Monitoring the Elastic Stack.

  1. Create a user that has appropriate authority to send system-level monitoring data to Elasticsearch. For example, you can use the built-in beats_system user or assign the built-in beats_system role to another user. For more information, see Setting Up User Authentication and Built-in Roles.
  2. Add the monitoring settings in the Heartbeat configuration file. If you configured the Elasticsearch output and want to send Heartbeat monitoring events to the same Elasticsearch cluster, specify the following minimal configuration:

    monitoring:
      enabled: true
      elasticsearch:
        username: beats_system
        password: somepassword

    If you configured a different output, such as Logstash or you want to send Heartbeat monitoring events to a separate Elasticsearch cluster (referred to as the monitoring cluster), you must specify additional configuration options. For example:

    monitoring:
      enabled: true
      elasticsearch:
        hosts: ["https://example.com:9200", "https://example2.com:9200"] 
        username: beats_system
        password: somepassword

    This setting identifies the hosts and port numbers of Elasticsearch nodes that are part of the monitoring cluster.

  3. Start Heartbeat.
  4. View the monitoring data in Kibana.