IMPORTANT: No additional bug fixes or documentation updates will be released for this version. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.

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Ingest metrics with Metricbeat

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Ingest metrics with Metricbeat

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If you haven’t already, you need to install Elasticsearch for storing and searching your data, and Kibana for visualizing and managing it. For more information, see Spin up the Elastic Stack.

Install and configure Metricbeat on your servers to collect and preprocess system and service metrics, such as information about running processes, as well as CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization numbers.

Metricbeat comes with predefined assets for parsing, indexing, and visualizing your data. To load these assets, Metricbeat uses modules, before sending them to Elasticsearch. Each integration defines the basic logic for collecting data from specific services, such as Redis or MySQL. A module consists of metricsets that fetch and structure the data. To learn more, see How Metricbeat works.

Step 1: Install Metricbeat

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Install Metricbeat as close as possible to the service you want to monitor.

To download and install Metricbeat, use the commands that work with your system:

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/metricbeat/metricbeat-8.3.3-amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i metricbeat-8.3.3-amd64.deb

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/metricbeat/metricbeat-8.3.3-x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -vi metricbeat-8.3.3-x86_64.rpm

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/metricbeat/metricbeat-8.3.3-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzvf metricbeat-8.3.3-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/beats/metricbeat/metricbeat-8.3.3-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
tar xzvf metricbeat-8.3.3-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Download the Metricbeat Windows zip file from the downloads page.
Extract the contents of the zip file into C:\Program Files.
Rename the metricbeat-<version>-windows directory to Metricbeat.
Open a PowerShell prompt as an Administrator (right-click the PowerShell icon and select Run As Administrator).

From the PowerShell prompt, run the following commands to install Metricbeat as a Windows service:

PS > cd 'C:\Program Files\Metricbeat'
PS C:\Program Files\Metricbeat> .\install-service-metricbeat.ps1

If script execution is disabled on your system, you need to set the execution policy for the current session to allow the script to run. For example: PowerShell.exe -ExecutionPolicy UnRestricted -File .\install-service-metricbeat.ps1.

Other installation options

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Step 2: Connect to Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Connections to Elasticsearch and Kibana are required to set up Metricbeat.

Set the connection information in metricbeat.yml. To locate this configuration file, see Directory layout.

Specify the cloud.id of your Elasticsearch Service, and set cloud.auth to a user who is authorized to set up Metricbeat. For example:

cloud.id: "staging:dXMtZWFzdC0xLmF3cy5mb3VuZC5pbyRjZWM2ZjI2MWE3NGJmMjRjZTMzYmI4ODExYjg0Mjk0ZiRjNmMyY2E2ZDA0MjI0OWFmMGNjN2Q3YTllOTYyNTc0Mw=="
cloud.auth: "metricbeat_setup:YOUR_PASSWORD"

This examples shows a hard-coded password, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore.

Set the host and port where Metricbeat can find the Elasticsearch installation, and set the username and password of a user who is authorized to set up Metricbeat. For example:

output.elasticsearch:
  hosts: ["https://myEShost:9200"]
  username: "metricbeat_internal"
  password: "YOUR_PASSWORD" 
  ssl:
    enabled: true
    ca_trusted_fingerprint: "b9a10bbe64ee9826abeda6546fc988c8bf798b41957c33d05db736716513dc9c"

This example shows a hard-coded password, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore.

This example shows a hard-coded fingerprint, but you should store sensitive values in the secrets keystore. The fingerprint is a HEX encoded SHA-256 of a CA certificate, when you start Elasticsearch for the first time, security features such as network encryption (TLS) for Elasticsearch are enabled by default. If you are using the self-signed certificate generated by Elasticsearch when it is started for the first time, you will need to add its fingerprint here. The fingerprint is printed on Elasticsearch start up logs, or you can refer to connect clients to Elasticsearch documentation for other options on retrieving it. If you are providing your own SSL certificate to Elasticsearch refer to Metricbeat documentation on how to setup SSL.

If you plan to use our pre-built Kibana dashboards, configure the Kibana endpoint. Skip this step if Kibana is running on the same host as Elasticsearch.

  setup.kibana:
    host: "mykibanahost:5601" 
    username: "my_kibana_user"  
    password: "{pwd}"

	The hostname and port of the machine where Kibana is running, for example, `mykibanahost:5601`. If you specify a path after the port number, include the scheme and port: `http://mykibanahost:5601/path`.
	The `username` and `password` settings for Kibana are optional. If you don’t specify credentials for Kibana, Metricbeat uses the `username` and `password` specified for the Elasticsearch output.
	To use the pre-built Kibana dashboards, this user must be authorized to view dashboards or have the `kibana_admin` built-in role.

To learn more about required roles and privileges, see Grant users access to secured resources.

Step 3: Enable and configure modules

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Identify the modules you need to enable. To see a list of available modules, run:

metricbeat modules list

metricbeat modules list

./metricbeat modules list

./metricbeat modules list

PS > .\metricbeat.exe modules list

From the installation directory, enable one or more modules. If you accept the default configuration without enabling additional modules, Metricbeat collects system metrics only.

The following command enables the nginx config in the modules.d directory:
```
metricbeat modules enable nginx
```
```
metricbeat modules enable nginx
```
```
./metricbeat modules enable nginx
```
```
./metricbeat modules enable nginx
```
```
PS > .\metricbeat.exe modules enable nginx
```
See the modules command to learn more about this command. If you are using a Docker image, see Run Metricbeat on Docker.
In the module config under modules.d, change the module settings to match your environment. See Standard config options for more about available settings.

To test your configuration file, change to the directory where the Metricbeat binary is installed, and run Metricbeat in the foreground with the following options specified: ./metricbeat test config -e. Make sure your config files are in the path expected by Metricbeat (see Directory layout), or use the -c flag to specify the path to the config file.

For more information about configuring Metricbeat, also see:

Configure Metricbeat
Config file format
metricbeat.reference.yml: This reference configuration file shows all non-deprecated options. You’ll find it in the same location as metricbeat.yml.

Step 4: Set up assets

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Metricbeat comes with predefined assets for parsing, indexing, and visualizing your data. To load these assets:

Make sure the user specified in metricbeat.yml is authorized to set up Metricbeat.
From the installation directory, run:
```
metricbeat setup -e
```
```
metricbeat setup -e
```
```
./metricbeat setup -e
```
```
./metricbeat setup -e
```
```
PS > .\metricbeat.exe setup -e
```
-e is optional and sends output to standard error instead of the configured log output.

This step loads the recommended index template for writing to Elasticsearch and deploys the sample dashboards for visualizing the data in Kibana.

A connection to Elasticsearch (or Elasticsearch Service) is required to set up the initial environment. If you’re using a different output, such as Logstash, see Load the index template manually and Load Kibana dashboards.

Step 5: Start Metricbeat

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Before starting Metricbeat, modify the user credentials in metricbeat.yml and specify a user who is authorized to publish events.

To start Metricbeat, run:

sudo service metricbeat start

If you use an init.d script to start Metricbeat, you can’t specify command line flags (see Command reference). To specify flags, start Metricbeat in the foreground.

Also see Metricbeat and systemd.

sudo service metricbeat start

If you use an init.d script to start Metricbeat, you can’t specify command line flags (see Command reference). To specify flags, start Metricbeat in the foreground.

Also see Metricbeat and systemd.

sudo chown root metricbeat.yml 
sudo chown root modules.d/nginx.yml 
sudo ./metricbeat -e

You’ll be running Metricbeat as root, so you need to change ownership of the configuration file and any configurations enabled in the modules.d directory, or run Metricbeat with --strict.perms=false specified. See Config File Ownership and Permissions.

sudo chown root metricbeat.yml 
sudo chown root modules.d/nginx.yml 
sudo ./metricbeat -e

PS C:\Program Files\metricbeat> Start-Service metricbeat

By default, Windows log files are stored in C:\ProgramData\metricbeat\Logs.

On Windows, statistics about system load and swap usage are currently not captured

Step 6: Confirm metrics are ingested

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Let’s confirm your data is correctly ingested to your cluster.

Launch Kibana:
1. Log in to your Elastic Cloud account.
2. Navigate to the Kibana endpoint in your deployment.
Point your browser to http://localhost:5601, replacing localhost with the name of the Kibana host.
Open the main menu, then click Discover
Select metricbeat-* as your data view.

Each document in the index that matches the metricbeat-* data view is displayed. By default, Discover shows data for the last 15 minutes.

Now let’s have a look at the Metrics app.

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