Cross cluster Monitoring

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

I'm trying to find out if Kibana 5.5 supports accessing monitoring data of remove clusters using the cross cluster search feature.
We have a central three-node Elasticsearch cluster and plan to scale by adding per customer custer which can be searched centrally using a cross cluster gateway node (is that the correct name?) on the server running Kibana.
Since Kibana 5.5 this works but the X-Pack monitoring data from Logstash and Elasticsearch itself logged to the central ES cluster isn't displayed in Kibana.

2

Hi Alexander,

We've had some preliminary discussions about using Cross Cluster Search for Monitoring. But it's not currently supported or recommended. For now, you should set up a dedicated monitoring cluster and have all your clustered forward their data to it. And then configure the monitoring cluster in the kibana.yml.

Thanks,
Lee

3

Hi Lee, thanks for your response!
So the central Kibana can't display the data from the monitoring cluster? Do I need to install a separate Kibana for the monitoring cluster?

4

Yes that is correct.

5

Is support for cross cluster monitoring in Kibana on the roadmap?

6

You can set xpack.monitoring.elasticsearch.url in your kibana.yml to point to your monitoring cluster if it's not the same as where you want to store your .kibana index.

xpack.monitoring.elasticsearch.url
The location of the Elasticsearch instance(s) where your monitoring data is stored. By default, this is the same as the elasticsearch.url. This setting enables you to use a single Kibana instance to search and visualize data in your production cluster as well as monitor data sent to a dedicated monitoring cluster.

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/5.5/monitoring-settings-kb.html

7

Excellent! Configured and works!
I was focusing on cross-cluster search when searching in the docs so missed that config option.
I guess when I configure the coordinating Elasticsearch node to store its monitoring data in another ES cluster I can disable the following settings as I've initially intended:

node.master: false # required because only node in cluster
node.data: false # required for kibana to store it's dashboards
node.ingest: false # required for x-pack monitoring

The Elasticsearch docs where lacking in this area when I setup the coordinating ES node for cross-cluster search.

8

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