ELK Migartion to 8.4.3

[Suraj_Jannu]

Hello,

Current ELK stack version details:
Elasticsearch: 7.5.1
Kibana: 6.7.2
Logstash: 6.8.12

We are using ELK purely as a log-aggregation platform and I am planning to update my ELK cluster 8.4.3.
Could you please help me out with the steps for upgrading all the versions to 8.4.3?
We need to make sure that we have minimal or no downtime and no data loss.

Questions:

1. How should I upgrade the elastic-search version from 7.5.1 to 8.4.3? I need to upgrade it to 7.17 first and then to 8.4.3 as per the documentation. Do I have to take care of upgrading to any other version in between?

2. What are the security changes we might need to adopt for changing elastic-search from 7.5.1 to 8.4.3?

3. Which migration approach should we use for this migration of data for Elasticsearch?

4. How the Kibana dashboard and alerting configurations can be migrated from 6.7.2 to 8.4.3?

5. What changes do we need to do in the Logstash upgrade from 6.8.12 to 8.4.3?

please provide a detailed explanation and help me achieve the goal.

Thanks and regards,
Suraj Jannu

[leandrojmp (Leandro Pereira)]

@Suraj_Jannu

How should I upgrade the elastic-search version from 7.5.1 to 8.4.3? I need to upgrade it to 7.17 first and then to 8.4.3 as per the documentation. Do I have to take care of upgrading to any other version in between?

You should upgrade to the last version of the 7.X branch, which is 7.17.7, then you check the Upgrade Assistant for conflicts before upgrading to the last version of the branch 8.X, which is 8.5.0

@Suraj_Jannu

What are the security changes we might need to adopt for changing elastic-search from 7.5.1 to 8.4.3?

Elasticsearch 8 has security enabled by the default, if you do not have security enabled, you will need to enable it. Keep in mind that it is not possible to enable security without a full stop of the cluster.

@Suraj_Jannu

Which migration approach should we use for this migration of data for Elasticsearch?

You need to provide more context, what migration are you talking about? Have you read the documentation about upgrading from 7.X to 8.X ?

@Suraj_Jannu

How the Kibana dashboard and alerting configurations can be migrated from 6.7.2 to 8.4.3?

Kibana should be in the same version of Elasticsearch, not sure how you are running Kibana 6.7 with Elastic 7.5 without any issues, a lot has changed between version 6.X and 8.X, expect to have to recreate dashboards and alerts depending on what you are using.

@Suraj_Jannu

What changes do we need to do in the Logstash upgrade from 6.8.12 to 8.4.3?

It is kind of impossible to know without more context, but a lot has also changed from 6.X to 8.X

@Suraj_Jannu

please provide a detailed explanation and help me achieve the goal.

I think that it is best for you to read the release notes from version 7.5.2 until version 8.5.0 for Elasticsearch, Kibana and Logstash to see if there is any breaking change that may impact you, breaking changes will be in the release notes when the major and minor version changes.