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Enable logging and monitoring

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:

For version 7.0 and later - Monitor a cluster

Before you begin

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Some limitations apply when you use monitoring on Elastic Cloud Enterprise. To learn more, check 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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Stack versions 8.0 and above

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When you enable monitoring in Elastic Cloud Enterprise, 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 is configured in the .monitoring-8-ilm-policy index lifecycle policy. To view or edit the policy open Kibana Stack management > Data > Index Lifecycle Policies.

Stack versions 7.x

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When you enable monitoring in Elastic Cloud Enterprise, your monitoring indices are retained for a certain period by default. After the retention period has passed, the monitoring indices are deleted automatically. Monitoring data is retained for three days by default or as specified by the xpack.monitoring.history.duration user setting.

To retain monitoring indices as is without deleting them automatically, you must disable the cleaner service by adding a disabled local exporter in your cluster settings.

For example

PUT /_cluster/settings
{
    "persistent": {
        "xpack.monitoring.exporters.__no-default-local__": {
            "type": "local",
            "enabled": false
        }
    }
}

Retention of logging indices

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

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.

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:

Log into the Cloud UI.
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.
From your deployment menu, go to the Logs and metrics page.
Select Enable.
Choose where to send your logs and metrics. Select 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, cloud provider, and region.

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.

Log into the Cloud UI.
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.
From your deployment menu, go to the Logs and Metrics page.
Select the corresponding View button to check the logs or metrics data.

Alternatively, you can access logs and metrics directly on the Kibana Logs and Stack Monitoring pages in the target monitoring deployment. You can also create an elastic-cloud-logs-* data view (formerly 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.

Other components

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Enabling log collection also supports collecting and indexing the following types of logs from other components in your deployments:

Enterprise Search

connectors.log*
crawler.log*
filebeat*
app-server.log*
system.log*
worker.log*
kibana.log*

App Search

app-search*.log

APM

apm*.log*

Fleet and Elastic Agent

fleet-server-json.log-*
elastic-agent-json.log-*

The ˆ*ˆ indicates that we also index the archived files of each type of log.

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

Metrics features

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With logging and monitoring enabled for a deployment, metrics are collected for Elasticsearch, Kibana, Enterprise Search, and APM with Fleet Server.

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:

Log into the Cloud UI.
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.
From your deployment menu, go to the Edit page.
To enable audit logs in Elasticsearch, in the Elasticsearch section select Edit user settings and plugins. For deployments with existing user settings, you may have to expand the Edit elasticsearch.yml caret for each node instead.
To enable audit logs in Kibana, in the Kibana section select Edit user settings. For deployments with existing user settings, you may have to expand the Edit kibana.yml caret instead.
Add xpack.security.audit.enabled: true to the user settings.
Select Save changes.

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

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