Monitor your Kubernetes cluster with Elastic Agent

[preview] This functionality is in technical preview and may be changed or removed in a future release. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features.

In this quickstart guide, you’ll learn how to create the Kubernetes resources that are required to monitor your cluster infrastructure.

This new approach requires minimal configuration and provides you with an easy setup to monitor your infrastructure. You no longer need to download, install, or configure the Elastic Agent, everything happens automatically when you run the kubectl command.

The kubectl command installs the standalone Elastic Agent in your Kubernetes cluster, downloads all the Kubernetes resources needed to collect metrics from the cluster, and sends it to Elastic.

Prerequisites

edit

An Observability project. To learn more, refer to Create an Observability project.
A user with the Admin role or higher—required to onboard system logs and metrics. To learn more, refer to Assign user roles and privileges.
A running Kubernetes cluster.
Kubectl.

Collect your data

edit

Create a new Observability project, or open an existing one.
In your Observability project, go to Add Data.
Select Monitor infrastructure, and then select Kubernetes.
To install the Elastic Agent on your host, copy and run the install command.

You will use the kubectl command to download a manifest file, inject user’s API key generated by Kibana, and create the Kubernetes resources.
Go back to the Add Observability Data page. There might be a slight delay before data is ingested. When ready, you will see the message We are monitoring your cluster.
Click Explore Kubernetes cluster to navigate to dashboards and explore your data.

Visualize your data

edit

After installation is complete and all relevant data is flowing into Elastic, the Visualize your data section allows you to access the Kubernetes Cluster Overview dashboard that can be used to monitor the health of the cluster.

Furthermore, you can access other useful prebuilt dashboards for monitoring Kubernetes resources, for example running pods per namespace, as well as the resources they consume, like CPU and memory.

Refer to Observability overview for a description of other useful features.

« Monitor hosts with Elastic Agent Observability billing dimensions »