Introduction
Oftentimes it is useful to manage and monitor Elasticsearch by exporting your cluster data to another cluster to be visualized, analyzed, monitored, etc etc.
Architecture
To do this, you need two separate Elasticsearch clusters; a primary datastore, and a second for your monitoring/management datastore.
Kibana will connect to the second of the two clusters, the cluster containing the monitoring data of the primary. This will allow you to monitor and manage your primary cluster using Kibana.
Deploy applications
We’ll use Juju to deploy our base search appliance:
$ juju deploy -n 3 ~omnivector/elasticsearch es-primary
$ juju deploy ~omnivector/elasticsearch es-secondary
$ juju deploy ~omnivector/kibana kibana
Expose
$ juju expose es-primary
$ juju expose kibana
Intended model status
Running the juju status command should provide output similar to the following:
Model Controller Cloud/Region Version SLA Timestamp
es-offsite-demo-00 pdl-aws-prod.peopledatalabs.com aws/us-west-2 2.7.0 unsupported 20:55:58Z
App Version Status Scale Charm Store Rev OS Notes
es-primary 6.8.8 active 3 es-no-storage jujucharms 1 ubuntu exposed
es-secondary 6.8.8 active 1 es-no-storage jujucharms 1 ubuntu
kibana 6.8.8 active 1 kibana jujucharms 7 ubuntu exposed
Unit Workload Agent Machine Public address Ports Message
es-primary/0* active idle 0 172.31.104.121 9200/tcp,9300/tcp Elasticsearch Running - 3 x all nodes
es-primary/1 active idle 1 172.31.102.65 9200/tcp,9300/tcp Elasticsearch Running - 3 x all nodes
es-primary/2 active idle 2 172.31.103.208 9200/tcp,9300/tcp Elasticsearch Running - 3 x all nodes
es-secondary/0* active idle 3 172.31.103.6 9200/tcp,9300/tcp Elasticsearch Running - 1 x all nodes
kibana/0* active idle 4 172.31.105.4 80/tcp Kibana available
Machine State DNS Inst id Series AZ Message
0 started 172.31.104.121 i-06593c260a1d873ea bionic us-west-2c running
1 started 172.31.102.65 i-0dba8479521611179 bionic us-west-2a running
2 started 172.31.103.208 i-01a1edc606ec53c79 bionic us-west-2b running
3 started 172.31.103.6 i-082f88ee5b20007aa bionic us-west-2b running
4 started 172.31.105.4 i-003b552c10e581d97 bionic us-west-2d running
Given the above environment, there are a set of ops that will get us from this initial deploy to one where the components are configured in the way described above.
Stop Elasticsearch and Kibana
Duration: 1:00
Stopping services will enable aggressive configuration changes outside of the charms’ hook execution cycle:
juju run --application es-primary "service elasticsearch stop"
juju run --application es-secondary "service elasticsearch stop"
juju run --application kibana "service kibana stop"
Enable monitoring on the primary node
Define a configuration file, es-primary-custom-config.yaml, with the following data:
# es-primary-custom-config.yaml
xpack.monitoring.enabled: true
xpack.monitoring.collection.enabled: true
xpack.monitoring.exporters:
es-secondary:
type: http
host: ["http://<es-secondary-ip>:9200"]
Apply configuration changes
juju config es-primary custom-config="$(cat es-primary-custom-config.yaml)"
Enable monitoring on the secondary node
juju config es-secondary custom-config="xpack.monitoring.enabled: false"
Restart ElasticSearch
Duration: 1:00
Restarting the search servers will apply their new configuration:
juju run --application es-primary "service elasticsearch start"
juju run --application es-secondary "service elasticsearch start"
Re-configure Kibana
Duration: 5:00
Delete old indices from secondary node
curl -XDELETE http://<es-secondary-ip>:9200/.monitoring-*
curl -XDELETE http://<es-secondary-ip>:9200/.kibana*
Restart Kibana
juju run --application kibana "service kibana start"
Verify
Duration: 3:00
At this point you should be able to log into the Kibana HTTP GUI and verify the es-primary nodes are appearing there:
Finish
Duration: 1:00
The upcoming release of the Omnivector Elasticsearch charms will include support for 7.x as well as support for this functionality as a built in automation.
Thanks!