# Confused about central management

**URL:** <https://discuss.elastic.co/t/confused-about-central-management/238676>\
**Category:** Beats\
**Tags:** fleet\
**Created:** [June 25, 2020, 12:57pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/confused-about-central-management/238676 "2020-06-25T12:57:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![DonHansDampf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/df705f/32.png) [@DonHansDampf](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/DonHansDampf)\
**Post date:** [June 25, 2020, 12:57pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/confused-about-central-management/238676/1 "2020-06-25T12:57:39Z")

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Hey there,

just started out with the Elastic Stack as main logging "technology". We set up our cluster, attached Kibana, deployed two Logstash Servers for traditional syslogging, aaaand discovered Beats: The "faster/better" solution than Logstash. So we gave it a try.

But we are confused about the state of central management. Our "strategy" was to deploy and enroll the agent via ansible on all needed hosts, and configure each beat via Kibana. I tough that this feature is "in beta" so I gave it a try and liked it (liked it more than for example configuring each beat via ansible - too many custom configurations). But now i discovered that at different points the documentation the management is called deprecated.

Does this mean everything will change and we shouldn't invest anymore time into beats management (and instead invest time in writing ansible playbooks) or only that the beta state will continue for a long time and a "major overhaul" will happen?

Hope you can point me in the right direction. Thank you!

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**Author:** ![mtojek](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/user_avatar/discuss.elastic.co/mtojek/32/63863_2.png) [@mtojek](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/mtojek)\
**Post date:** [June 25, 2020, 1:57pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/confused-about-central-management/238676/2 "2020-06-25T13:57:53Z")

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You might be interested in this feature: [https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ingest-management/current/ingest-management-overview.html](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ingest-management/current/ingest-management-overview.html)

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**Author:** ![DonHansDampf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/df705f/32.png) [@DonHansDampf](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/DonHansDampf)\
**Post date:** [June 25, 2020, 2:05pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/confused-about-central-management/238676/3 "2020-06-25T14:05:54Z")

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Looks promising. That's probably the reason why central management is so... empty 😉

Your links includes many warnings about running this feature in production. We don't plan to create some hyper-complex configuration setups with this feature, but we also don't want to wait till this get's production ready.

It could be possible to use this feature for now in our production cluster "to get started". And remove the entries before the next release and lose our configurations, or am I missing something?

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**Author:** ![system](https://us1.discourse-cdn.com/elastic/original/3X/1/a/1ac57faf039f6b580b3f104ef42a2a89e41014de.png) [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)\
**Post date:** [July 23, 2020, 4:05pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/confused-about-central-management/238676/4 "2020-07-23T16:05:56Z")

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