X-Pack provides cluster functionalities that allow you to control and monitor your nodes and cluster. This is a very useful component of X-Pack as it is the lifesaver on large installations.
You need an up-and-running Elasticsearch installation as we described in the Downloading and installing Elasticsearch recipe in Chapter 2, Downloading and Setup.
You also need a functional Kibana installation as described in the Installing Kibana and X-Pack recipe. The X-Pack is not needed.
To use X-Pack Elasticsearch monitor, we will perform the following steps:
We access the Dev Tools section of Kibana as shown in the following screenshot:
Now we can use the dev console to create/execute/test queries and other Elasticsearch HTTP API via it as shown in the following screenshot: