Secure communication with Elasticsearch

To secure the communication between Metricbeat and Elasticsearch, you can use HTTPS and basic authentication. Basic authentication for Elasticsearch is available when you enable X-Pack security (see Secure a cluster and Use security features). If you aren’t using X-Pack security, you can use a web proxy instead.

Here is a sample configuration:

output.elasticsearch:
  username: metricbeat 
  password: verysecret 
  protocol: https 
  hosts: ["elasticsearch.example.com:9200"] 

Metricbeat verifies the validity of the server certificates and only accepts trusted certificates. Creating a correct SSL/TLS infrastructure is outside the scope of this document.

By default Metricbeat uses the list of trusted certificate authorities from the operating system where Metricbeat is running. You can configure Metricbeat to use a specific list of CA certificates instead of the list from the OS. You can also configure it to use client authentication by specifying the certificate and key to use when the server requires the Metricbeat to authenticate. Here is an example configuration:

output.elasticsearch:
  username: metricbeat
  password: verysecret
  protocol: https
  hosts: ["elasticsearch.example.com:9200"]
  ssl.certificate_authorities: 
    - /etc/pki/my_root_ca.pem
    - /etc/pki/my_other_ca.pem
  ssl.certificate: "/etc/pki/client.pem" 
  ssl.key: "/etc/pki/key.pem"