Secure communication with Elasticsearch

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

Here is a sample configuration:

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

Packetbeat 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 Packetbeat uses the list of trusted certificate authorities from the operating system where Packetbeat is running. You can configure Packetbeat 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 Beat to authenticate. Here is an example configuration:

output.elasticsearch:
  username: packetbeat
  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"