Elastic Observability

1. Overview #

A solution built into Kibana.

The applications #

2. Elastic Agent and Fleet #

A single, centrally managed agent.

Principle #

Elastic Agent replaces the various Beats with a single agent. It is managed from Kibana by Fleet: you define policies made of integrations (System, Nginx, PostgreSQL, Kubernetes...), and agents apply them automatically.

# Commande fournie par Kibana (Fleet > Add agent), de la forme :
sudo ./elastic-agent install --url=https://fleet.example.org:8220 --enrollment-token=<jeton>

Each integration creates its data streams (for example logs-nginx.access-default, metrics-system.cpu-default), its ingest pipelines and ready-to-use dashboards.

Good practice: The type-dataset-namespace convention lets you set permissions and retention per namespace (for example production and staging).

3. APM and OpenTelemetry #

Traces and application performance.

Instrumenting #

Elastic APM accepts the historical Elastic agents (Java, .NET, Node.js, Python, Go, PHP, Ruby) and OpenTelemetry. Elastic publishes its own OpenTelemetry distributions (EDOT) and now recommends this path.

# Exemple : application Java avec l'agent OpenTelemetry vers Elastic (OTLP)
export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=checkout
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=https://apm.example.org
export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_HEADERS="Authorization=ApiKey <cle>"
export OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES=deployment.environment=production
java -javaagent:opentelemetry-javaagent.jar -jar checkout.jar

The APM application shows, per service, throughput, latency, error rate, the slowest transactions, traces and the service map built from observed calls.

Synthetics #

// journeys/panier.journey.ts (projet Synthetics, Playwright)
import { journey, step, expect } from '@elastic/synthetics';
journey('Ajout au panier', ({ page }) => {
  step('Accueil', async () => { await page.goto('https://boutique.example.org'); });
  step('Ajouter', async () => {
    await page.click('text=Ajouter au panier');
    expect(await page.isVisible('text=1 article')).toBeTruthy();
  });
});