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Heartbeat quick start: installation and configuration

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Heartbeat quick start: installation and configuration

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This guide describes how to get started quickly collecting uptime data about your hosts. You’ll learn how to:

install Heartbeat
specify the protocols to monitor
send uptime data to Elasticsearch
visualize the uptime data in Kibana

Before you begin

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You need Elasticsearch for storing and searching your data, and Kibana for visualizing and managing it.

To get started quickly, spin up a deployment of our hosted Elasticsearch Service. The Elasticsearch Service is available on AWS, GCP, and Azure. Try it out for free.

Step 1: Install Heartbeat

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Unlike most Beats, which you install on edge nodes, 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.

To download and install Heartbeat, use the commands that work with your system:

Version 8.17.0 of Heartbeat has not yet been released.

The commands shown are for AMD platforms, but ARM packages are also available. Refer to the download page for the full list of available packages.

Other installation options

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Step 2: Connect to the Elastic Stack

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Connections to Elasticsearch and Kibana are required to set up Heartbeat.

Set the connection information in heartbeat.yml. To locate this configuration file, see Directory layout.

Specify the cloud.id of your Elasticsearch Service, and set cloud.auth to a user who is authorized to set up Heartbeat. For example:

cloud.id: "staging:dXMtZWFzdC0xLmF3cy5mb3VuZC5pbyRjZWM2ZjI2MWE3NGJmMjRjZTMzYmI4ODExYjg0Mjk0ZiRjNmMyY2E2ZDA0MjI0OWFmMGNjN2Q3YTllOTYyNTc0Mw=="
cloud.auth: "heartbeat_setup:YOUR_PASSWORD"

This examples shows a hard-coded password, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore.

Set the host and port where Heartbeat can find the Elasticsearch installation, and set the username and password of a user who is authorized to set up Heartbeat. For example:

output.elasticsearch:
  hosts: ["https://myEShost:9200"]
  username: "heartbeat_internal"
  password: "YOUR_PASSWORD" 
  ssl:
    enabled: true
    ca_trusted_fingerprint: "b9a10bbe64ee9826abeda6546fc988c8bf798b41957c33d05db736716513dc9c"

This example shows a hard-coded password, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore.

This example shows a hard-coded fingerprint, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore. The fingerprint is a HEX encoded SHA-256 of a CA certificate, when you start Elasticsearch for the first time, security features such as network encryption (TLS) for Elasticsearch are enabled by default. If you are using the self-signed certificate generated by Elasticsearch when it is started for the first time, you will need to add its fingerprint here. The fingerprint is printed on Elasticsearch start up logs, or you can refer to connect clients to Elasticsearch documentation for other options on retrieving it. If you are providing your own SSL certificate to Elasticsearch refer to Heartbeat documentation on how to setup SSL.

If you plan to use our pre-built Kibana dashboards, configure the Kibana endpoint. Skip this step if Kibana is running on the same host as Elasticsearch.

  setup.kibana:
    host: "mykibanahost:5601" 
    username: "my_kibana_user"  
    password: "{pwd}"

	The hostname and port of the machine where Kibana is running, for example, `mykibanahost:5601`. If you specify a path after the port number, include the scheme and port: `http://mykibanahost:5601/path`.
	The `username` and `password` settings for Kibana are optional. If you don’t specify credentials for Kibana, Heartbeat uses the `username` and `password` specified for the Elasticsearch output.
	To use the pre-built Kibana dashboards, this user must be authorized to view dashboards or have the `kibana_admin` built-in role.

To learn more about required roles and privileges, see Grant users access to secured resources.

You can send data to other outputs, such as Logstash, but that requires additional configuration and setup.

Step 3: Configure Heartbeat monitors

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Heartbeat provides monitors to check the status of hosts at set intervals. Heartbeat currently provides monitors for ICMP, TCP, and HTTP (see Heartbeat overview for more about these monitors).

You configure each monitor individually. In heartbeat.yml, specify the list of monitors that you want to enable. Each item in the list begins with a dash (-). The following example configures Heartbeat to use three monitors: an icmp monitor, a tcp monitor, and an http monitor.

heartbeat.monitors:
- type: icmp
  schedule: '*/5 * * * * * *' 
  hosts: ["myhost"]
  id: my-icmp-service
  name: My ICMP Service
- type: tcp
  schedule: '@every 5s' 
  hosts: ["myhost:12345"]
  mode: any 
  id: my-tcp-service
- type: http
  schedule: '@every 5s'
  urls: ["http://example.net"]
  service.name: apm-service-name 
  id: my-http-service
  name: My HTTP Service

	The `icmp` monitor is scheduled to run exactly every 5 seconds (10:00:00, 10:00:05, and so on). The `schedule` option uses a cron-like syntax based on this `cronexpr` implementation.
	The `tcp` monitor is set to run every 5 seconds from the time when Heartbeat was started. Heartbeat adds the `@every` keyword to the syntax provided by the `cronexpr` package.
	The `mode` specifies whether to ping one IP (`any`) or all resolvable IPs
	The `service.name` field can be used to integrate heartbeat with elastic APM via the Uptime UI.

To test your configuration file, change to the directory where the Heartbeat binary is installed, and run Heartbeat in the foreground with the following options specified: ./heartbeat test config -e. Make sure your config files are in the path expected by Heartbeat (see Directory layout), or use the -c flag to specify the path to the config file.

For more information about configuring Heartbeat, also see:

Configure Heartbeat
Config file format
heartbeat.reference.yml: This reference configuration file shows all non-deprecated options. You’ll find it in the same location as heartbeat.yml.

Step 4: Configure the Heartbeat location

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Heartbeat can be deployed in multiple locations so that you can detect differences in availability and response times across those locations. Configure the Heartbeat location to allow Kibana to display location-specific information on Uptime maps and perform Uptime anomaly detection based on location.

To configure the location of a Heartbeat instance, modify the add_observer_metadata processor in heartbeat.yml. The following example specifies the geo.name of the add_observer_metadata processor as us-east-1a:

# ============================ Processors ============================

processors:
  - add_observer_metadata:
      # Optional, but recommended geo settings for the location Heartbeat is running in
      geo: 
        # Token describing this location
        name: us-east-1a 
        # Lat, Lon "
        #location: "37.926868, -78.024902"

	Uncomment the `geo` setting.
	Uncomment `name` and assign the name of the location of the Heartbeat server.
	Optionally uncomment `location` and assign the latitude and longitude.

For more information about configuring Heartbeat, also see:

Configure Heartbeat
Config file format
heartbeat.reference.yml: This reference configuration file shows all non-deprecated options. You’ll find it in the same location as heartbeat.yml.

Step 5: Set up assets

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Heartbeat comes with predefined assets for parsing, indexing, and visualizing your data. To load these assets:

Make sure the user specified in heartbeat.yml is authorized to set up Heartbeat.
From the installation directory, run:
```
heartbeat setup -e
```
```
heartbeat setup -e
```
```
./heartbeat setup -e
```
```
./heartbeat setup -e
```
```
PS > .\heartbeat.exe setup -e
```
-e is optional and sends output to standard error instead of the configured log output.

This step loads the recommended index template for writing to Elasticsearch. It does not install Heartbeat dashboards. Heartbeat dashboards and installation steps are available in the uptime-contrib GitHub repository.

A connection to Elasticsearch (or Elasticsearch Service) is required to set up the initial environment. If you’re using a different output, such as Logstash, see Load the index template manually.

Step 6: Start Heartbeat

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Before starting Heartbeat, modify the user credentials in heartbeat.yml and specify a user who is authorized to publish events.

To start Heartbeat, run:

sudo service heartbeat-elastic start

If you use an init.d script to start Heartbeat, you can’t specify command line flags (see Command reference). To specify flags, start Heartbeat in the foreground.

Also see Heartbeat and systemd.

sudo service heartbeat-elastic start

If you use an init.d script to start Heartbeat, you can’t specify command line flags (see Command reference). To specify flags, start Heartbeat in the foreground.

Also see Heartbeat and systemd.

sudo chown root heartbeat.yml 
sudo ./heartbeat -e

You’ll be running Heartbeat as root, so you need to change ownership of the configuration file, or run Heartbeat with --strict.perms=false specified. See Config File Ownership and Permissions.

sudo chown root heartbeat.yml 
sudo ./heartbeat -e

You’ll be running Heartbeat as root, so you need to change ownership of the configuration file, or run Heartbeat with --strict.perms=false specified. See Config File Ownership and Permissions.

PS C:\Program Files\heartbeat> Start-Service heartbeat

By default, Windows log files are stored in C:\ProgramData\heartbeat\Logs.

Heartbeat is now ready to check the status of your services and send events to your defined output.

Step 7: View your data in Kibana

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Heartbeat comes with pre-built Kibana dashboards and UIs for visualizing the status of your services. The dashboards are available in the uptime-contrib GitHub repository.

If you loaded the dashboards earlier, open them now.

To open the dashboards:

Launch Kibana:
1. Log in to your Elastic Cloud account.
2. Navigate to the Kibana endpoint in your deployment.
Point your browser to http://localhost:5601, replacing localhost with the name of the Kibana host.
In the side navigation, click Discover. To see Heartbeat data, make sure the predefined heartbeat-* data view is selected.

If you don’t see data in Kibana, try changing the time filter to a larger range. By default, Kibana shows the last 15 minutes.
In the side navigation, click Dashboard, then select the dashboard that you want to open.

The dashboards are provided as examples. We recommend that you customize them to meet your needs.

What’s next?

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Now that you have your uptime data streaming into Elasticsearch, learn how to unify your logs, metrics, uptime, and application performance data.

Ingest data from other sources by installing and configuring other Elastic Beats:

Elastic Beats To capture

Metricbeat

Infrastructure metrics

Filebeat

Logs

Winlogbeat

Windows event logs

APM

Application performance metrics

Auditbeat

Audit events

Elastic Beats	To capture
Metricbeat	Infrastructure metrics
Filebeat	Logs
Winlogbeat	Windows event logs
APM	Application performance metrics
Auditbeat	Audit events

Use the Observability apps in Kibana to search across all your data:

Elastic apps	Use to
Metrics app	Explore metrics about systems and services across your ecosystem
Logs app	Tail related log data in real time
Uptime app	Monitor availability issues across your apps and services
APM app	Monitor application performance
SIEM app	Analyze security events

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