Documentation
Get the official technical documentation for all Search Guard versions.
Community Forum
Any questions on installation or configuration? Ask our community forum.
Frequently asked questions
What is Search Guard?
Search Guard is an enterprise security and alerting suite for Elasticsearch and Kibana. It adds authentication, role-based access control, document- and field-level security, audit logging, encryption at rest, and alerting to your Elastic Stack — everything regulated organizations need to run Elasticsearch securely and stay compliant.
What are the main features?
Search Guard covers the full security lifecycle of an Elasticsearch cluster: TLS encryption for all traffic, authentication via LDAP, Active Directory, SAML, OpenID Connect, Kerberos, and JSON Web Tokens, role-based access control down to individual documents and fields, Kibana multi-tenancy, comprehensive audit logging, encryption at rest, and the Signals alerting module for monitoring your data and triggering notifications via email, Slack, PagerDuty, Jira, webhooks, and more.
Who is Search Guard for?
Organizations of every size that run Elasticsearch — with a special focus on regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, government, research, and critical infrastructure, where access control, auditability, and data protection are mandatory. Search Guard is trusted by enterprises, universities, and public institutions worldwide.
Presentations
Browse our library of presentations on all Search Guard features.
White Papers
Download our whitepapers on Search Guard use cases and implementation examples.
Blog
Upgrading to Elasticsearch 9: Why Your "Read-Only" 7.x Indices Still Block the Boot
Daniel Gleim || 2026-09-03
Use Kibana’s Upgrade Assistant to reindex or mark 7.x indices read-only, not just index.blocks.write, or 9.x will still refuse to start.
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Writing Kibana Plugins , Part 5: Adding a User Interface
Jochen Kressin || 2026-08-31
In this last part of our series, we will add a nice little user interface to manage the data in our accounts sample index.
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LDAP Authentication Broken in Elasticsearch 8.18.0: The Entitlements Bug
Jochen Kressin || 2026-08-18
Elasticsearch 8.18.0 and 9.0.0 broke LDAP authentication with a NotEntitledException error. Learn what caused it and how to fix it.
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Understanding Translog Recovery When a Failed Node Rejoins Your Elasticsearch Cluster
Jochen Kressin || 2026-08-06
Learn how Elasticsearch handles translog recovery when a failed primary node rejoins the cluster after a replica has been promoted.
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How Elasticsearch Checks for Document Existence with Custom IDs
Jochen Kressin || 2026-07-21
Discover how Elasticsearch efficiently checks document existence when using custom IDs through shard routing and logarithmic terms dictionary lookups.
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Encryption at Rest for Elasticsearch: The Complete Series
Daniel Gleim || 2026-07-16
The full Encryption at Rest series in one place: what it is, where it applies across industries, and how it maps to PCI-DSS, GDPR, SOX and more. Plus an FAQ.
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Source Code
Access, download and inspect all our code on Gitlab, report any issue you find or request a feature.
Newsletter
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CVE Advisory
We are the official CVE numbering authority for Search Guard. Browse the list of known issues..
Disclosure Policy
If you have found a security related issue, please read our disclosure policy.