Send data to Elasticsearchedit

Now that you have provisioned your first deployment of your Elasticsearch cluster, you’re ready to ingest your logs, metrics, uptime, and APM data.

To make full use of Elastic Observability, we recommend that you install the observability products in the following order:

  1. Install and configure Filebeat on your servers to collect log events.

    Filebeat allows you ship log data from sources that come in the form of files. It monitors the log files or locations that you specify, collects log events, and forwards them to Elasticsearch. To ease the collection and parsing of log formats for common applications such as Apache, MySQL, and Kafka, a number of modules are available.

  2. Install and configure Metricbeat on your servers to collect and preprocess system and service metrics, such as information about running processes, as well as CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization numbers.

    Metricbeat comes with predefined assets for parsing, indexing, and visualizing your data. To load these assets, Metricbeat uses modules, before sending them to Elasticsearch. Each integration defines the basic logic for collecting data from specific services, such as Redis or MySQL. A module consists of metricsets that fetch and structure the data.

    To learn more, see How Metricbeat works.

  3. Install and configure Heartbeat on your servers to periodically check the status of your services.

    Heartbeat uses probing to monitor the availability of services and helps verify that you’re meeting your service level agreements for service uptime. You typically install Heartbeat as part of a monitoring service that runs on a separate machine and possibly even outside of the network where the services that you want to monitor are running.

  4. If you have added an APM Server as part of an Elasticsearch Service deployment, configure your APM agents to send data to your Elasticsearch cluster.

    Elastic APM monitors software services and applications in real time, collects unhandled errors and exceptions, and automatically picks up basic host-level metrics and agent specific metrics.