How monitoring worksedit

Each monitored Elastic Stack component is considered unique in the cluster based on its persistent UUID, which is written to the path.data directory when the node or instance starts.

Monitoring documents are just ordinary JSON documents built by monitoring each Elastic Stack component at a specified collection interval. If you want to alter how these documents are structured or stored, refer to Configuring data streams/indices for monitoring.

You can use Elastic Agent or Metricbeat to collect monitoring data and to ship it directly to the monitoring cluster.

To learn how to collect monitoring data, refer to: