Elastic Cloud puts the functionality of Elastic Stack in your hands in minutes. Whether you’re trying to add Search capabilities through Elastic Enterprise Search, monitor critical systems and applications through Elastic Observability, or protect your organization from cyber threats through Elastic Security, The first step is always easy.
Run as you like
Elastic Cloud gives you the flexibility to run in the public Cloud of your choice, including Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. There are other options for hybrid cloud, private cloud and on-premise deployment. You can also easily manage your deployment using our built-in automation and choreography tools. This tutorial focuses on using Elastic Cloud’s managed Elasticsearch Service, which is the easiest way to get up and running with Elastic. Before you start, be sure to understand the benefits of our hosting services and our shared responsibilities.
Understand the Elastic Stack
Elastic Cloud is based on Elastic Stack. The Elastic Stack consists of Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash:
- Elasticsearch is a search and analysis engine. This is where the data is stored in an index and made searchable.
- With Kibana, you can easily build dashboards to visualize data in Elasticsearch. You define how to shape the data.
- Beats is a lightweight data transporter installed in your other systems that either sends data directly to Elasticsearch or forwards it from Logstash to Elasticsearch.
- Logstash is a data processing pipeline tool that can be used to move data around and transform it.
An introduction to
We offer a free 14-day trial of Elastic Cloud where you can create your own deployments. Alternatively, you can purchase from the cloud service provider of your choice and benefit from consolidated billing through its marketplace. Your Elastic Cloud fee should be credited to any commitments you may have entered into. Once registered, you’ll see the Elastic Cloud console.
To start the deployment, click Create DePolyment.
Deployment of choice
When creating a deployment, choose one of the pre-configured solutions that best fits your needs. You can also customize a deployment before creating it, or modify an existing deployment. Adjust capacity and performance, add more features, and so on.
Elastic Cloud brings Elastic Enterprise Search, Observability, and Security capabilities to your Cloud environment. They are:
- Elastic Enterprise Search: Search everything anytime, anywhere. Elastic App Search provides all the tools you need to design and deploy a powerful Search experience for your web and mobile applications. Elastic Workplace Search provides your team with a unified Search experience across all collaboration, productivity, and storage tools to help them find what they need anytime, anywhere.
- Elastic Observability: Unified logging, metrics, APM tracking, etc., so you can monitor global distribution by federation across clusters and evaluate the interrelationships of each signal. Machine learning can detect anomalies and notify you of problems via alerts, so you can quickly resolve problems and continue to deliver a great digital experience.
- Elastic Security: Effective network Security requires large-scale data – Elastic Security addresses core data and scale issues. Leading Security teams use Elastic Security solutions for SIEM, endpoint Security, threat hunting, cloud monitoring and more. Intuitive user interfaces and a broad integrated ecosystem help every analyst succeed.
- Elastic Stack: Select your own try. Select this option if you have use cases other than observability, security, or enterprise search. By combining various machine learning and reporting capabilities with hardware profile templates, Elastic gives you the flexibility you need to easily customize your components.
Deployment Settings
In this example, we will select “Elastic Observability” and how to use its powerful monitoring capabilities to observe the performance of a local computer (in this case, a laptop). If you need to make changes, simply click Expand. When setting up a new cluster, you can choose from Google Cloud, Azure, or AWS. After selecting the provider, select the area closest to you. If you are a U.S. government user, an organization that handles government-controlled data, or work in a highly regulated industry, you will need to use cloud services licensed by Elastic FedRAMP. It is now available on AWS GovCloud (US) and is licensed by FedRAMP at medium impact level. Sign up for a free 30-day trial to get started. When you create a new deployment, the latest version is used by default.
You can also assign a name to the deployment. Keep in mind that you can customize the deployment for use cases as needed.
Start your deployment
password
You are provided with a password when you create the deployment. Be sure to save it, as you will need it to log in to Kibana (application interface) as well as command line operations.
If you didn’t save it or don’t remember it, don’t worry! You can reset the password at any time.
How to log in
When you launch Kibana from the Elastic Cloud console, you will automatically log in as an administrator because you have created a deployment. Other users will be able to log in using the Kibana endpoint link in the console. By choosing to use Log in with Elastic Cloud, you can Log in as an administrator using the same link.
After creating a trial deployment, click Open Kibana.
Intake data
Clicking to open Kibana brings you to the “Elastic Observability” overview page in Kibana. Click Add Data.
We have a variety of data extraction options to choose from, and for this example, we want to understand the performance of the system. Navigate to Metrics and find System Metrics.
Once you have selected the data type to extract, you are presented with a series of instructions. The following examples show how to install and configure Metricbeat to collect system metrics and add a pre-configured Dashboard.
When you view the data, you receive a green notification indicating that data is being received.
Next, click the System Metrics Dashboard button.
This will take you to a pre-built dashboard designed to take the data now flowing into deployment from the computer and populate it with charts and graphs to show everything from CPU and memory usage to inbound and outbound network traffic. Try hovering over different parts of the dashboard or even clicking “Top Hosts by CPU” to see how to interact with Kibana.
If you want to take this one step further, it will help you understand best practices for performance benchmarking and sizing Elasticsearch clusters. When sizing the cluster, make sure you know: Amount of data indexed per day (GB) Amount of data you will keep How many replica shards you will keep. The whole process is quick and easy. Here, you can ingest additional data and build your own visualizations in Kibana so that you can monitor APM data, metrics, logs, and more on a large scale. If you’re new to Kibana, check out our Introductory Kibana Webinar tutorial as well as our free Kibana Basics lesson!
Begin immediately
Launch the free 14-day trial, or check out our blog for more information on how to deploy on your cloud service provider of choice:
- Elastic on Google Cloud Get Started
- Getting started with Elastic on Microsoft Azure
- Elastic on AWS Getting started
- Getting started with Elastic Cloud, FedRAMP and AWS GovCloud
Discover more resources to help you make the most of Elastic Cloud. Contact other users in the Elastic Community or on our discussion forums.