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Elastic Docs ›Elastic Cloud Enterprise Reference [2.11] ›Administering deployments

Enable logging and monitoring

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Enable logging and monitoring

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The deployment logging and monitoring feature lets you monitor your deployment in Kibana by shipping logs and metrics to a monitoring deployment. You can:

  • View your deployment’s health and performance in real time and analyze past cluster, index, and node metrics.
  • View your deployment’s logs to debug issues, discover slow queries, surface deprecations, and analyze access to your deployment.

Monitoring consists of two components:

  • A monitoring and logging agent that is installed on each node in your deployment. The agents collect and index metrics to Elasticsearch, either on the same deployment or by sending logs and metrics to an external monitoring deployment. Elastic Cloud Enterprise manages the installation and configuration of the monitoring agent for you, and you should not modify any of the settings.
  • The stack monitoring application in Kibana that visualizes the monitoring metrics through a dashboard and the logs application that allows you to search and analyze deployment logs.

The steps in this section cover only the enablement of the monitoring and logging features in Elastic Cloud Enterprise. For more information on how to use the monitoring features, refer to the following documentation:

Before you begin

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Some limitations apply when you use monitoring on Elastic Cloud Enterprise. To learn more, see the monitoring restrictions and limitations.

Monitoring for production use

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For production use, you should send your deployment logs and metrics to a dedicated monitoring deployment. Monitoring indexes logs and metrics into Elasticsearch and these indexes consume storage, memory, and CPU cycles like any other index. By using a separate monitoring deployment, you avoid affecting your other production deployments and can view the logs and metrics even when a production deployment is unavailable.

How many monitoring deployments you use depends on your requirements:

  • You can ship logs and metrics for many deployments to a single monitoring deployment, if your business requirements permit it.
  • Although monitoring will work with a deployment running a single node, you need a minimum of three monitoring nodes to make monitoring highly available.

  • You might need to create dedicated monitoring deployments for isolation purposes in some cases. For example:

    • If you have many deployments and some of them are much larger than others, creating separate monitoring deployments prevents a large deployment from potentially affecting monitoring performance for smaller deployments.
    • If you need to silo Elasticsearch data for different business departments. Deployments that have been configured to ship logs and metrics to a target monitoring deployment have access to indexing data and can manage monitoring index templates, which is addressed by creating separate monitoring deployments.

Logs and metrics that get sent to a dedicated monitoring Elasticsearch deployment may not be cleaned up automatically and might require some additional steps to remove excess data periodically.

Retention of monitoring daily indices

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When you enable monitoring in Elastic Cloud Enterprise by configuring your deployment to send monitoring data to itself, your monitoring indices are retained for a certain period by default. After the retention period has passed, the monitoring indices are deleted automatically. The retention period when a deployment sends monitoring data to itself depends on the version of Elasticsearch:

When monitoring for production use, where you configure your deployments to send monitoring data to a dedicated monitoring deployment for indexing, this retention period does not apply. Monitoring indices on a dedicated monitoring deployment are retained until you remove them. There are two options open to you:

  • To enable the automatic deletion of monitoring indices from dedicated monitoring deployments, enable monitoring on your dedicated monitoring deployment in Elastic Cloud Enterprise to send monitoring data to itself. When an Elasticsearch deployment sends monitoring data to itself, all monitoring indices are deleted automatically after the retention period, regardless of the origin of the monitoring data.
  • To retain monitoring indices on a dedicated monitoring deployment as is without deleting them automatically, no additional steps are required other than making sure that you do not enable the monitoring deployment to send monitoring data to itself. You should also monitor the deployment for disk space usage and upgrade your deployment periodically, if necessary.

Retention of logging indices

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Log retention is determined by the version of the monitoring deployment.

  • For versions 6.x: Logs are not managed automatically and will be retained forever. You can configure Index Lifecycle Management (ILM) in versions 6.7 and later, or configure Curator to manage your log retention for you.
  • For versions 7.0 and later: An ILM policy is pre-configured to manage log retention. The policy can be adjusted according to your requirements.

Index management using ILM

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When monitoring to a deployment at version 6.7 or later, you can configure Index Lifecycle Management (ILM) to manage retention of your monitoring and logging indices. When sending logs to a deployment at version 7.0 or later, an ILM policy is pre-configured to manage log retention and the policy can be customized to your needs.

Index management using Curator

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When monitoring to a deployment before version 6.6, you can run Curator on-premise to manage indices on Elastic Cloud Enterprise. For example, you can use Curator to clean up monitoring indices like any other time-based index.

Enable logging and monitoring

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Elastic Cloud Enterprise manages the installation and configuration of the monitoring agent for you. When you enable monitoring on a deployment, you are configuring where the monitoring agent for your current deployment should send its logs and metrics.

To enable monitoring on your deployment:

  1. Log into the Cloud UI.

  2. On the deployments page, select your deployment.

    Narrow the list by name, ID, or choose from several other filters. To further define the list, use a combination of filters.

  3. From your deployment menu, go to the Logs and Metrics page.

  4. Choose where to send your logs and metrics. Click Save.

    If a deployment is not listed, make sure that it is running a compatible version. The monitoring deployment and production deployment must be on the same major version.

    Remember to send logs and metrics for production deployments to a dedicated monitoring deployment, so that your production deployments are not impacted by the overhead of indexing and storing monitoring data. A dedicated monitoring deployment also gives you more control over the retention period for monitoring data.

Enabling logs and monitoring may trigger a plan change on your deployment. You can monitor the plan change progress from the deployment’s Activity page.

Access the monitoring application in Kibana

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With monitoring enabled for your deployment, you can access the logs and stack monitoring through Kibana.

  1. Log into the Cloud UI.

  2. On the deployments page, select your deployment.

    Narrow the list by name, ID, or choose from several other filters. To further define the list, use a combination of filters.

  3. From your deployment menu, go to the Logs and Metrics page.
  4. Click the corresponding View button to see the logs or metrics data.

Alternatively, you can access logs and metrics directly from the Logs and Stack Monitoring tabs in the Kibana of the target monitoring deployment. You can also create an elastic-cloud-logs-* index pattern to view your deployment’s logs in the Kibana Discover tab. Several fields are available for you to view logs based on key details, such as the source deployment:

Field Description Example value

service.id

The ID of the deployment that generated the log

6ff525333d2844539663f3b1da6c04b6

service.name

The name of the deployment that generated the log

My Production Deployment

cloud.availability_zone

The availability zone in which the instance that generated the log is deployed

ap-northeast-1d

service.node.name

The ID of the instance that generated the log

instance-0000000008

service.type

The type of instance that generated the log

elasticsearch

service.version

The version of the stack resource that generated the log

7.10.2

Logging features

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When shipping logs to a monitoring deployment there are more logging features available to you. These features include:

For Elasticsearch:

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  • Audit logging - logs security-related events on your deployment
  • Slow query and index logging - helps find and debug slow queries and indexing
  • Verbose logging - helps debug stack issues by increasing component logs

After you’ve enabled log delivery on your deployment, you can add the Elasticsearch user settings to enable these features.

For Kibana:

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  • Audit logging - logs security-related events on your deployment

After you’ve enabled log delivery on your deployment, you can add the Kibana user settings to enable this feature.

See the respective product documentation for more information about the logging capabilities of each product.

Enabling Elasticsearch/Kibana audit logs on your deployment

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Audit logs are useful for tracking security events on your Elasticsearch and/or Kibana clusters. To enable Elasticsearch audit logs on your deployment:

  1. Log into the Cloud UI.

  2. On the deployments page, select your deployment.

    Narrow the list by name, ID, or choose from several other filters. To further define the list, use a combination of filters.

  3. From your deployment menu, go to the Edit page.
  4. At the bottom of each Elasticsearch and/or Kibana node, expand the User settings overrides caret.
  5. Add xpack.security.audit.enabled: true to the user settings.
  6. Click Save changes.

A plan change will run on your deployment. When it finishes, audit logs will be delivered to your monitoring deployment.

Restrictions and limitations

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  • To avoid compatibility issues between versions, the deployment sending monitoring metrics and the monitoring deployment receiving them should be at the same major version. If using the same version is not feasible, check for breaking changes in the X-Pack Release Notes or the Marvel Release Notes to make sure that your versions are compatible.
  • Monitoring across regions is not supported. If you need to move your existing monitoring to the same region, you can do a reindex or create a new deployment and select the snapshot from the old deployment.
  • Metrics that are sent to a dedicated monitoring deployment are not cleaned up automatically and might require some additional steps to remove excess data periodically.
  • The logs shipped to monitoring cluster use an ILM managed index (elastic-cloud-logs). If you need to delete indices due to space, do not delete the current is_write_enabled: true index.
  • Traffic filters cannot be used with monitoring. If you are shipping metrics to a monitoring deployment, do not associate traffic filters with the Elasticsearch deployment you are sending the metrics to. Since you cannot explicitly allow traffic from certain deployments currently, associating traffic filters with your monitoring deployment will result in deployments being blocked when sending data.
  • Log delivery is only supported on production deployments version 6.0 and later, and it requires a monitoring deployment version 6.5 and later.
  • Verbose logging in Kibana is only supported on production deployments version 7.6 and later.
  • When sending metrics to a dedicated monitoring deployment, the graph for IO Operations Rate(/s) is blank. This is due to the fact that this graph actually contains metrics from of all of the virtualized resources from the provider.
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