IMPORTANTYou are looking at documentation for an older release. Starting in version 7.5, see the Logs monitoring guide and the Metrics monitoring guide for information about infrastructure monitoring.

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Getting started with infrastructure monitoring

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Getting started with infrastructure monitoring

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To get started with infrastructure monitoring, you need:

An Elasticsearch cluster and Kibana (version 6.5 or later) with a basic license
Appropriate Beats shippers (version 6.5 or later) installed and enabled on each system you want to monitor

If your data uses nonstandard fields, you may also need to modify some default configuration settings.

Get Elasticsearch and Kibana

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To get started, you can use our hosted Elasticsearch Service on Elastic Cloud (recommended for new users), or you can install Elasticsearch and Kibana locally.

Use our hosted service

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The hosted Elasticsearch Service is available on both AWS and GCP. Try out the Elasticsearch Service for free.

Install Elasticsearch and Kibana locally

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Alternatively, you can install Elasticsearch and Kibana locally. Follow the instructions to install Elasticsearch, and to install and start Kibana.

Install Beats shippers

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To start collecting metrics and log data, you need to install and configure the following Beats shippers:

Metricbeat for metrics
Filebeat for log data

You can install and configure Beats shippers for most kinds of data directly from Kibana, or you can install Beats yourself.

Install Beats from Kibana

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To install Beats from Kibana, on the machine where you want to collect the data, open a Kibana browser window. In the Add Data to Kibana section, click Add metric data or Add log data. Now follow the instructions for the type of data you want to collect. The instructions walk you through the steps required to download, install and configure the appropriate Beats modules for your data.

Install Beats yourself

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If your data source doesn’t have a Beats module, or if you want to install Beats the old fashioned way:

For metrics data, follow the instructions in Metricbeat getting started and enable modules for the metrics you want to collect.
For logs data, follow the instructions in Filebeat modules quick start and enable modules for the logs you want to collect. If there is no module for the logs you want to collect, see the Filebeat getting started to learn how to configure inputs.

Enable modules

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However you install Beats, you need to enable the appropriate modules in Filebeat and Metricbeat to populate the Infrastructure and Logs views with data.

To populate the Hosts view in the Infrastructure app and add logs, enable:

Metricbeat system module (enabled by default)
Filebeat system module
Other Filebeat modules needed for your environment, such as apache2, redis, and so on
Metricbeat add_host_metadata processor (enabled by default)
Metricbeat add_cloud_metadata processor (enabled by default)

To populate the Docker view in the Infrastructure app and add logs, enable:

To populate the Kubernetes view in the Infrastructure app and add logs, enable:

Configure your data sources

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If your metrics data or logs data has non-standard fields, you may need to modify some configuration settings in Kibana to change the default behaviors, such as the index pattern used to query the data, and the timestamp field used for sorting. For more information, see Infrastructure UI Settings and Logs UI Settings.

More about container monitoring

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If you’re monitoring Docker containers or Kubernetes pods, you can use autodiscover to automatically change the configuration settings in response to changes in your containers. This ensures you don’t stop collecting data when your container configuration changes. To learn how to do this, see:

« Overview Infrastructure metrics »