Using a separate Kibana server with APM and an AWS ES Cluster

Elastic Observability APM
1

I working with a colleague on an AWS hosted ES solution where APM is going to be used. We understand that the APM Kibana UI is incompatible with ES as a Service on AWS, using the built in Kibana Plugin.

However, If we were to deploy a standalone kibana EC2 instance which is configured to talk to the ES as a Service Cluster (much like APM Server would do) would this be a viable alternative to a self managed fleet of EC2 instances ?

2

That's not viable, you'll need the default distribution of Elasticsearch to use the APM UI with, which is not available on AWS ES. You can deploy Elastic's own Elasticsearch service on AWS, which includes apm-server, for a fully hosted solution including the APM UI.

3

So is there a component of the APM UI thats built into the Elastic Search nodes ? or is it just a licencing issue ?

I could understand it if was using a feature in ES it's self. But if the UI is part of Kibana and Kibana is on a separate server to the ES cluster what is the preventative issue ?

4

The default distribution of Kibana contains proprietary features and is designed to require the default distribution of Elasticsearch. This limitation is there primarily for commercial reasons (as far as I can tell) as it allows the Elastic Cloud Elasticsearch service to differentiate itself based on features compared to AWS ES. It is therefore as you said a licensing issue.

5

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