Best practices for integrations assets

When you use integrations with Fleet and Elastic Agent there are some restrictions to be aware of.

When you use standalone Elastic Agent with integrations, the integration assets added to the Elastic Agent policy must be installed on the destination Elasticsearch cluster.

Fleet integration assets are meant to work only with Elastic Agent.

The Fleet integration assets are not supposed to work when sending arbitrary logs or metrics collected with other products such as Filebeat, Metricbeat or Logstash.

While it’s possible to include Fleet and Elastic Agent integration assets in a custom integration, this is not recommended nor supported. Assets from another integration should not be referenced directly from a custom integration.

As an example scenario, one may want to ingest Redis logs from Kafka. This can be done using the Redis integration, but only certain files and paths are allowed. It’s technically possible to use the Custom Kafka Logs integration with a custom ingest pipeline, referencing the ingest pipeline of the Redis integration to ingest logs into the index templates of the Custom Kafka Logs integration data streams.

However, referencing assets of an integration from another custom integration is not recommended nor supported. A configuration as described above can break when the integration is upgraded, as can happen automatically.

As an alternative to referencing assets from another integration from within a custom integration, assets such as index templates and ingest pipelines can be copied so that they become standalone.

This way, because the assets are not managed by another integration, there is less risk of a configuration breaking or of an integration asset being deleted when the other integration is upgraded.

Note, however, that creating standalone integration assets based off of Fleet and Elastic Agent integrations is considered a custom configuration that is not tested nor supported. Whenever possible it’s recommended to use standard integrations.