X-Pack is an Elastic Stack extension that bundles security, alerting, monitoring, reporting, machine learning, and graph capabilities into one easy-to-install package. It adds essential features to make Elastic Stack production ready. Unlike the components of Elastic Stack, which are open source, X-Pack is a commercial offering from Elastic.co, and so it requires a paid license for usage. When you install X-Pack for the first time, you are given a 30-day trial. The basic or free version will provide only monitoring and Dev Tools such as Search Profiler and Grok Debugger. Even though X-Pack comes as a bundle, it allows one to easily enable or disable the features one wants to use.
In this chapter, let's explore the following topics:
- Installing X-Pack on Elasticsearch and Kibana
- Securing Elasticsearch and Kibana
- Monitoring Elasticsearch
- Exploring alerting