News

Elastic Stack Release - 5.0.0 alpha 1

By
Shay Banon

At Elastic{ON}16 we announced the Elastic Stack. Before diving into detail about the 5.0 alpha release, let us review why this release is so important.

When we say “Heya, to the Elastic Stack and X-Pack,” we are making a powerful statement about how we develop our products and how our community and customers will consume those products.

The Elastic Stack is more than just a name. It is an investment in building, testing, and releasing all products together. Recognizing this, we incremented the version number to 5.0.0. This is not just about our release cycles. It is a commitment to make it easier for developers to add new functionality not just to a single product, but to the entire Stack. Which brings us to the notion of “packs.” Packs are bundled extensions for the whole Elastic Stack - and they’re key in making your life easier.

Say heya to the X-Pack. Naming things is the greatest challenge in computer science; perhaps only surpassed by exactly-once delivery, guaranteed messages of order, and exactly-once delivery. Marvel, Shield, and Watcher will be product names no longer. (Quick, can you tell us which product performed which feature?) Rather, all commercial capabilities are combined into X-Pack, which includes security, alerting, monitoring, Graph, and reporting features. This ensures a consistent experience during installation and usage. In addition, features (like security) will apply to the entirety of the Stack.

In addition, we will soon be announcing the Elastic Pioneer Program to recognize community participation. The feedback garnered during the 2.0 release was invaluable. Help us make 5.0 the most scrutinized release ever.

Happy downloading and testing! Keep in mind, it is an alpha so don’t put it into production. Given that this is an alpha release, it is not available on Elastic Cloud. We expect a release candidate version of 5.0.0 in the coming months which we’ll make available on Elastic Cloud, the best hosted Elastic Stack.

Let’s explore a few of the alpha details at a high-level.

Elasticsearch

For more detailed information, and quite a few other features, peruse the Elasticsearch detail post.

  • Ingest Node - Processors, Pipelines, and filters...oh my! A new node type for Elasticsearch that knows how to process and enrich your data. Getting data into Elasticsearch can now be achieved through a variety of flexible approaches (Beats, Logstash, Ingest Node).
  • Lucene 6 - Multi-dimensional points, a tree-based data structure, are here in Elasticsearch 5.0. Half the space, twice as fast, with 25% increase in search performance? Yes, please.
  • Instant Aggregations - Nobody likes loading bars, so we’re working hard to do our part to eliminate them.  Elasticsearch now makes much more efficient, more cacheable queries, especially on data separated into time-based indexes.  Expect your Logstash+Elasticsearch+Kibana time-series aggregations (like those in date histograms) to fly!

Kibana

For more detailed information, view the Kibana detail post.

  • New Design - Kibana is the window to the Elastic Stack. And now that window is colourful, clean, and without unnecessary elements and wasted navigation space.
  • Application Framework - We’ve built applications for Kibana. Now applications appear in the main nav, not as hidden elements in the “app switcher”

As a note:  No, we haven’t lost our senses.  But 5.0.0 alpha 1 has temporarily lost its Sense. Sense will remain open source and will be built into Kibana, directly, as “Console”. But it is not yet available in this release.

Logstash

For more detailed information, grok the Logstash detail post.

  • Event Statistics - Measure all the things. Or, specifically, the number of events processed by Logstash. And do so via an API.
  • Hot Threads - A hot threads API? Similar to the one in Elasticsearch? But for Logstash? Download the alpha and start tracing stacks.

Beats

For more detailed information, a lightweight Beats detail post (at the edge).

  • Custom Fields - Beats have always been lightweight, now they are even more flexible. Document customization, tag creation, etc. are implemented at the libbeat level. Available for Elastic, and community beats.
  • JSON Support - Filebeat can now natively decode JSON from log lines. For example, do you use Filebeat with Docker? Your day just got easier.
  • Kafka Output  - We listened to your feedback and added Kafka output support in Beats. While, at the same time, removing the deprecation mark for the Redis output.

X-Pack

X-Pack is a single extension for Elasticsearch and Kibana that brings together the functionality of Shield, Watcher, Marvel, Graph, and adds new Reporting capabilities. All of the products now install together, have the sleek new Kibana 5 design, and it’s easier than ever to get started! Among the new features and improvements, Reporting is a highlight:

  • Reporting - With a click of a button you can now export and download your dashboards as PDFs. Alternatively you can schedule the reports using Watcher’s email action.