Monitoring in a production environment

Set up the Elasticsearch cluster you want to use for monitoring. For example, you might set up a two host cluster with the nodes es-mon-1 and es-mon-2.

Configure X-Pack monitoring in Kibana.

Create a user on the monitoring cluster that has the remote_monitoring_agent role. These credentials will be used when data is shipped from the Elasticsearch cluster you are monitoring to your dedicated monitoring cluster. For example, the following request creates a remote_monitor user that has the remote_monitoring_agent role:

POST /_xpack/security/user/remote_monitor
{
  "password" : "changeme",
  "roles" : [ "remote_monitoring_agent"],
  "full_name" : "Internal Agent For Remote Monitoring"
}

Configure each Elasticsearch node in the cluster you are monitoring to send metrics to your monitoring cluster by configuring an HTTP exporter in the xpack.monitoring.exporters settings in elasticsearch.yml.

xpack.monitoring.exporters:
  id1:
    type: http
    host: ["http://es-mon-1:9200", "http://es-mon2:9200"] 
    auth.username: remote_monitor 
    auth.password: changeme

If SSL/TLS is enabled on the monitoring cluster, specify the trusted CA certificate(s) that will be used to verify the identity of the nodes in the monitoring cluster.

To add a CA certificate to an Elasticsearch node’s trusted certificates, you can specify the location of the PEM encoded certificate with the certificate_authorities setting:

xpack.monitoring.exporters:
  id1:
    type: http
    host: ["https://es-mon1:9200", "https://es-mon2:9200"]
    auth:
      username: agent-user
      password: password
    ssl:
      certificate_authorities: [ "/path/to/ca.crt" ]

Alternatively, you can configure trusted certificates using a truststore (a Java Keystore file that contains the certificates):

xpack.monitoring.exporters:
  id1:
    type: http
    host: ["https://es-mon1:9200", "https://es-mon2:9200"]
    auth:
      username: remote_monitor
      password: changeme
    ssl:
      truststore.path: /path/to/file
      truststore.password: password

Restart Elasticsearch on the nodes in your production cluster.

To verify your X-Pack monitoring installation, point your web browser at your Kibana host, and select Monitoring from the side navigation. When security is enabled, to view the monitoring dashboards you must log in to Kibana as a user who has both the kibana_user and monitoring_user roles. For example:

POST /_xpack/security/user/stack-monitor
{
  "password" : "changeme",
  "roles" : [ "kibana_user", "monitoring_user" ]
}