Documentation for Monitoring Elasticsearch with Metricbeat is outdated

[leandrojmp (Leandro Pereira)]

Hello,

I've created a new production cluster on 8.4 and a new monitoring cluster as well, following the documentation to configure monitoring using metricbeat there is this step:

Set xpack.monitoring.collection.enabled to true on the production cluster. By default, it is disabled (false ).

PUT _cluster/settings
{
  "persistent": {
    "xpack.monitoring.collection.enabled": true
  }
}

But running the above request in dev tools gives you the following warning:

#! [xpack.monitoring.collection.enabled] setting was deprecated in Elasticsearch and will be removed in a future release.

Also, after running this request a couple of monitoring indices were created in the production cluster, which is something that it is not expected nor wanted.

I've checked on my old cluster, on version 7.17, and this setting is set to false with no impact in the monitoring cluster, so I disabled it in the new cluster and there was also no change in the monitoring cluster.

Searching for more information I found this pull request from December 2021 in one of Elastic Repositories that says:

Completely remove the xpack.monitoring.* settings as they were never needed for the stack monitoring feature to work.

So, it looks like that the documentation is outdated and this step needs to be removed.

[matschaffer]

Thanks for the feedback @leandrojmp !

I added a link to this post on Revise configuring-metricbeat documentation · Issue #139338 · elastic/kibana · GitHub which we have open to revise the documentation.