Configuring monitoring in Kibana

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Configuring monitoring in Kibana

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If you enable the collection of monitoring data in your cluster, you can optionally collect metrics about Kibana.

The following method involves sending the metrics to the production cluster, which ultimately routes them to the monitoring cluster. For an alternative method, see Monitoring Kibana with Metricbeat.

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

  1. Enable the collection of monitoring data in Elastic Stack. Set xpack.monitoring.collection.enabled to true on the production cluster.

    For example, you can use the following APIs to review and change this setting:

    GET _cluster/settings
    
    PUT _cluster/settings
    {
      "persistent": {
        "xpack.monitoring.collection.enabled": true
      }
    }

    For more information, see Monitoring settings in Elasticsearch and Cluster update settings.

  2. Verify that xpack.monitoring.enabled and xpack.monitoring.kibana.collection.enabled are set to true in the kibana.yml file. These are the default values. For more information, see Monitoring settings in Kibana.
  3. Identify where to send monitoring data. Kibana automatically sends metrics to the Elasticsearch cluster specified in the elasticsearch.url setting in the kibana.yml file. This property has a default value of http://localhost:9200.

    In production environments, we strongly recommend using a separate cluster (referred to as the monitoring cluster) to store the data. Using a separate monitoring cluster prevents production cluster outages from impacting your ability to access your monitoring data. It also prevents monitoring activities from impacting the performance of your production cluster.

    If X-Pack security is enabled on the production cluster, use an HTTPS URL such as https://<your_production_cluster>:9200 in this setting.

  4. If X-Pack security is enabled on the production cluster:

    1. Verify that there is a valid user ID and password in the elasticsearch.username and elasticsearch.password settings in the kibana.yml file. These values are used when Kibana sends monitoring data to the production cluster.
    2. Configure Kibana to encrypt communications between the Kibana server and the production cluster. This set up involves generating a server certificate and setting server.ssl.* and elasticsearch.ssl.certificateAuthorities settings in the kibana.yml file on the Kibana server. For example:

      server.ssl.key: /path/to/your/server.key
      server.ssl.certificate: /path/to/your/server.crt

      If you are using your own certificate authority to sign certificates, specify the location of the PEM file in the kibana.yml file:

      elasticsearch.ssl.certificateAuthorities: /path/to/your/cacert.pem

      For more information, see Configuring Security.

  5. Start Kibana.
  6. View the monitoring data in Kibana.