X-Pack monitoring is a great feature for capturing Elasticsearch cluster diagnostics. It is free and can be used together with unique security features of the Search Guard. Moreover, Search Guard already comes with predefined roles that make it easy to use X-Pack Monitoring, Alerting and Machine Learning.

Basic setup

We start with following demo-installer steps to install Elasticsearch (ES) and Search Guard:
    Download Elasticsearch.
    Install Search Guard plugin version that matches ES version installed
    Install demo configuration:
    cd  /plugins/search-guard-6/tools chmod +x ./installdemoconfiguration.sh ./installdemoconfiguration.sh
    Add entries to kibana.yml that allow Kibana connect to secured Elasticsearch Plugin.
# Use HTTPS instead of HTTP elasticsearch.url: "https://localhost:9200" # Configure the Kibana internal server user elasticsearch.username: "kibanaserver" elasticsearch.password: "kibanaserver" # Disable SSL verification because we use self-signed demo certificates elasticsearch.ssl.verificationMode: none # Whitelist the Search Guard Multi Tenancy Header elasticsearch.requestHeadersWhitelist: [ "Authorization", "sgtenant" ]
When we start Kibana, we see an error in logs:
log   [18:39:46.702] [error][status][plugin:[email protected]] Status changed from uninitialized to red - X-Pack Security needs to be disabled for Search Guard to work properly. Please set 'xpack.security.enabled' to false in your kibana.yml
Since Elasticsearch 6.3, X-Pack is installed and switched on by default. Search Guard works great with X-Pack Monitoring, Alerting and Machine Learning, but does not work with X-Pack Security, which is reasonable.
We switch off xpack.security in kibana.yml by adding:
xpack.security.enabled: false
and start Kibana again. Note that X-Pack Security needs to be also disabled in Elasticsearch. This has been done automatically by our demo installation script.
When we log with an admin account, we see "Monitoring" section on the left sidebar menu. We can turn monitoring on by pressing the blue button:
image1
Everything works almost like a charm.
image2

Extending basic setup

Monitoring data is stored in ES indexes and it is recommended to store those indexes on a separate ElasticSearch cluster. Well, if your cluster goes down and will not be able to start again, it may be great to take a look at the monitoring data to figure what was going on, before the cluster crashed. Additionally, You may want to present monitoring dashboards without providing admin credentials.
All of these can be solved with Search Guard.

Exporting monitoring data to another cluster

X-Pack monitoring agents are used to capture diagnostics data and export them either locally or to another cluster. Moreover, it is possible to export data to a cluster secured by Search Guard.
In our demo we can setup another cluster on the same local machine running on a different port. This can be accomplished by the following entry in elasticsearch.yml:
http.port: 19200
Then, we need to configure X-Pack exporters:
xpack.monitoring.exporters:  id1:    type: http    host: ["https://localhost:19200"]    auth:      username: admin      password: admin    ssl:      certificate_authorities: root-ca.pem
We just need to specify cluster hosts, authentication parameters and a path to SSL certificate, which may be our root-ca.pem

Creating monitoring user

Let us now create a user with permissions dedicated to accessing monitoring data on a monitoring cluster. Search Guard comes with predefined roles:
    sg_kibana_user
      this role has the minimal permissions required to use Kibana
    sg_xp_monitoring
       this role has the required permissions to access monitoring in Kibana
Based on that, we can create a role mapping in sg_roles_mapping.yml:
sg_xp_monitoring:  backendroles:    - xp_monitoring sg_kibana_user: backendroles: - kibanauser
and a user in sginternalusers.yml:
screen_monitor:  hash: $2y$12$MQjxoV607aDfVvJnKcVYqeGST3rOoGOazAhbVZTMQ548Ykr19YrCi  roles:    - kibanauser     - xp_monitoring
where password hash has been generated by a hash.sh script from plugins/search-guard-6/tools directory. Running the script may require adding execute permissions on a file (chmod +x ../tools/hash.sh)
Do not forget to reload cluster config after that:
./sgadmin.sh -cd ../sgconfig/ -icl -nhnv  \   -cacert ../../../config/root-ca.pem \   -cert ../../../config/kirk.pem \   -key ../../../config/kirk-key.pem
Enjoy the power of Search Guard and X-Pack Monitoring!

Where to go next:

Published: 2018-10-01
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