Upgrade Elastic Security to 8.9.2

Before you upgrade Elastic Security, take the necessary preparation steps, which will vary depending on what version you are upgrading to:

Rolling upgrades are unsupported in Elastic Security, which runs within the Kibana application. To upgrade, you must shut down all Kibana instances, install the new software, and restart Kibana. Upgrading while older Kibana instances are running can cause data loss or upgrade failures.

When upgrading several Kibana instances connected to the same Elasticsearch cluster, ensure that all outdated instances are shut down before starting the upgrade.

Rolling upgrades are unsupported in Kibana. However, when outdated instances are shut down, you can start all upgraded instances in parallel, which allows all instances to participate in the upgrade migration in parallel.

For large deployments with more than 10 Kibana instances and more than 10,000 saved objects, you can reduce the upgrade downtime by bringing up a single Kibana instance and waiting for it to complete the upgrade migration before bringing up the remaining instances.

Automatic updates of Elastic prebuilt detection rules are supported for the current Elastic Security version and the latest three previous minor releases. For example, if you’re upgrading to Elastic Security 8.10, you’ll be able to use the Rules UI to update your prebuilt rules until Elastic Security 8.14 is released. After that point, you can still manually download and install updated prebuilt rules, but you must upgrade to the latest Elastic Security version to receive automatic updates.

Take these extra steps to ensure you are ready for migration.

Problems with your Elasticsearch cluster can prevent Kibana upgrades from succeeding.

During the upgrade process, Kibana creates new indices into which updated documents are written. If a cluster is approaching the low watermark, there’s a high risk of Kibana not being able to create these. Reading, transforming, and writing updated documents can be memory intensive, using more available heap than during routine operation. You must ensure that enough heap is available to prevent requests from timing out or throwing errors from circuit breaker exceptions. You should also ensure that all shards are replicated and assigned.

A healthy cluster has:

When you perform an upgrade migration of different Kibana versions, the migration can fail. Ensure that all Kibana instances are running the same version, configuration, and plugins.

Be sure to have a snapshot of all your data before migrating, so that if something goes wrong during migration, you can restore from the snapshot and try again.

Review the common causes of Kibana upgrade failures and how to prevent them.

After you upgrade to 8.8 or later, frequency settings for rule actions created in 8.7 or earlier are automatically moved from the rule level to the action level. The action schedules remain the same and will continue to run on their previously specified frequency (On each rule execution, Hourly, Daily, or Weekly).

This section provides the necessary steps you need to take before upgrading to 8.x. It also contains new requirements and other pertinent information that affect various features in the Elastic Security app.

First, review the breaking changes for each product you use and make the necessary changes so your code is compatible with 8.9.2.

Any active rules when you upgrade from 7.17 to 8.0.1 or newer are automatically disabled, and a tag named auto_disabled_8.0 is added to those rules for tracking purposes. Once the upgrade is complete, you can filter rules by the newly added tag, then use bulk actions to re-enable them:

Alternatively, you can use the Bulk rule actions API to re-enable rules.

When you manually install Elastic Endpoint, you must approve a system extension, kernel extension, and enable Full Disk Access (FDA). There is a new FDA requirement in 8.x. Refer to Elastic Endpoint requirements to review the required permissions.

To make the Data view option appear in an environment with legacy alerts, a user with elevated role privileges must visit the Elastic Security app, open a page that displays alert data (such as the Overview page), then refresh the page. The user’s role privileges must allow them to enable the detections feature in a Kibana space. Refer to Enable and access detections for more information.

The system index for detection alerts has been renamed from .siem-signals-<space-id> to .alerts-security.alerts-<space-id> and is now a hidden index. Therefore, the schema used for alert documents in Elastic Security has changed. Users that access documents in the .siem-signals indices using the Elastic Security API must modify their API queries and scripts to operate properly on the new 8.x alert documents. Refer to how to query alert indices and review the new Alert schema.

Changes to the indicator match rule’s default threat indicator path might require you to update existing rules or create new ones after upgrading to 8.x. Be mindful of the following:

To upgrade from 7.16.0 or earlier to 8.9.2, you must first upgrade your Elastic Stack and Elastic Agents to 7.17 (refer to Upgrade Fleet-managed Elastic Agents). This enables you to use the Upgrade Assistant to prepare for the upgrade. Before you upgrade, you must resolve all critical issues identified by the Upgrade Assistant. Afterwards, you can upgrade to 8.x.

Initially, Elastic Agents will be version 7.17. This is fine because Elastic Security 8.x supports the last minor release in 7.x (7.17) and any subsequent Elastic Endpoint versions in 8.x. After the Elastic Stack upgrade, you can decide whether to upgrade Elastic Agents to 8.x, which is recommended to ensure you get the latest features.