What are .monitoring indices?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

We are using ELK but NOT X-Pack and recently upgraded to 6.3. We have noticed the following indices appearing:
monitoring-es-6-2018.08.12
monitoring-es-6-2018.08.11
monitoring-es-6-2018.08.17
monitoring-kibana-6-2018.08.11
monitoring-kibana-6-2018.08.13
monitoring-kibana-6-2018.08.16
...

What are these?
Can we delete them?
How best to manage them (periodic deletion mechanism)?

Thanks

2

Those are system indices created by Elasticsearch and Kibana, they're usually small and gets deleted after seven days so i wouldn't worry.

3

In addition to what Bernt said: With 6.3 x-pack ships with any distribution by default and monitoring is enabled by default. If you really want to disable it, you can, see https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/monitoring-settings.html

4

Thanks guys!