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Get started with Elastic Observability

Stack Serverless

New to Elastic Observability? Discover more about our observability features and how to get started. The following instructions will guide you through setting up your first Elastic Observability deployment, collecting data from infrastructure and applications, and exploring your data.

Learn how to spin up a deployment on Elastic Cloud Hosted or create an Elastic Observability Serverless project and use Elastic Observability to gain deeper insight into the behavior of your applications and systems.

  1. Create an Observability project

    An Elastic Observability Serverless project allows you to run Elastic Observability Serverless in an autoscaled and fully-managed environment, where you don’t have to manage the underlying Elasticsearch cluster or Kibana instances.

    Steps for creating a project
    Note

    The Admin role or higher is required to create projects. Refer to Assign user roles and privileges.

    1. Navigate to cloud.elastic.co and log in to your account, or create one.

    2. Select Create serverless project.

    3. Under Elastic for Observability, select Next.

    4. Enter a name for your project.

    5. (Optional) Select Edit settings to change your project settings:

      • Cloud provider: The cloud platform where you’ll deploy your project. We currently support Amazon Web Services (AWS).
      • Region: The region where your project will live.

    6. Select Create project. It takes a few minutes to create your project.

    7. When the project is ready, click Continue.

    For other types of deployments, refer to Deploy. For a breakdown of the differences between deployment types and what they support, refer to Detailed deployment comparison.

  2. Collect infrastructure logs and metrics

    Bring logs and metrics from your hosts and services into Elastic Observability to monitor the health and performance of your infrastructure. You can collect this data from hosts, containers, Kubernetes, and Cloud services.

    Steps for collecting infrastructure logs and metrics

    Elastic Observability can collect telemetry data from hosts, containers, and Kubernetes through the EDOT Collector or the Elastic Agent.

    1. Select Add data from the main menu and then select Host.
    2. Select one of these options:
      • OpenTelemetry: Full Observability: Collect native OpenTelemetry metrics and logs.
      • Elastic Agent: Logs & Metrics: Bring data from Elastic integrations.
    3. Follow the instructions for your platform.

    For an overview of the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector, refer to Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT).

    Elastic Observability can collect telemetry data from Kubernetes through the Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry Collector or the Elastic Agent.

    1. Select Add data from the main menu and then select Kubernetes.
    2. Select one of these options:
      • OpenTelemetry: Full Observability: Collect native OpenTelemetry metrics and logs.
      • Elastic Agent: Logs & Metrics: Bring data from Elastic integrations.
    3. Follow the instructions for your platform.

    For an overview of EDOT, refer to Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT).

    Elastic Observability can collect telemetry data from services through Elastic integrations.

    1. Select Add data from the main menu.
    2. In Search through other ways of ingesting data, type the name of an integration (for example, NGINX).
    3. Select the integration you want to add.
    4. Select Add.

    Elastic Observability can collect telemetry data from cloud services through Elastic integrations.

    1. Select Add data from the main menu and then select Cloud.
    2. Select your Cloud provider to view the collection of integrations available for that provider.
    3. Select the integration you want to add.
    4. Select Add.

    Elastic Observability can collect telemetry data from CI/CD pipelines using OpenTelemetry.

    Refer to CI/CD for more information.

    Elastic provides a powerful LLM observability framework including key metrics, logs, and traces, along with pre-configured, out-of-the-box dashboards that deliver deep insights into model prompts and responses, performance, usage, and costs.

    Refer to LLM observability for more information.

  3. Collect application traces, metrics, and logs

    Bring traces, logs, and metrics into Elastic APM to help you troubleshoot and optimize your applications. You can collect this data using OpenTelemetry or APM Server.

    Steps for collecting application traces, metrics, and logs

    The Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry (EDOT) SDKs facilitate the collection of traces, metrics, and logs in OpenTelemetry format into Elastic APM.

    1. Select Add data from the main menu and then select Application.
    2. Select OpenTelemetry.
    3. Follow the instructions for your platform.

    Use the APM agents to collect traces, metrics, and logs through APM Server.

    1. Select Add data from the main menu and then select Application.
    2. Select Elastic APM.
    3. Select the tab for your language or framework.
    4. Follow the instructions in the tab.

  4. Add Synthetics monitoring

    Synthetics monitoring lets you simulate, track, and visualize user journeys to catch performance, availability, and functionality issues in your services and applications. It periodically checks the status of your services and applications.

    Steps for adding Synthetics monitoring
    1. Select Add data from the main menu and then select Application.
    2. Select Synthetic monitor.
    3. Select a monitor type.
    4. Fill out the details.
    5. (Optional) Add a Playwright script.
    6. Test and create your monitor.

  5. Explore your logs, metrics, and traces

    After you've onboarded your data, you can explore it in the following Elastic Observability UIs, or query it using query languages.

  6. Create your first dashboards

    Elastic provides a wide range of prebuilt dashboards for visualizing observability data from a variety of sources. These dashboards are loaded automatically when you install Elastic integrations. You can also create new dashboards and visualizations based on your data views.

    To create a new dashboard, select Create Dashboard and begin adding visualizations. You can create charts, graphs, maps, tables, and other types of visualizations from your data, or you can add visualizations from the library. You can also add other types of panels, such as filters and controls.

    For more information about creating dashboards, refer to Create your first dashboard.

  7. Set up alerts and SLOs

    Elastic Observability lets you define rules of different types which detect complex conditions and trigger relevant actions. Observability can send alerts to email, Slack, and other third-party systems. Refer to Create and manage rules to get started.

    Observability also lets you define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to set clear, measurable targets for your service performance, based on factors like availability, response times, error rates, and other key metrics. Refer to Create and manage SLOs to get started.

Use these resources to learn more about Observability or get started in a different way.

Quickstarts are compact hands-on guides that help you experiment with Observability features. Each quickstart provides a highly opinionated, fast path to data ingestion, with minimal configuration required.

Browse the Elastic Observability quickstarts to get started with specific use cases.

Many Observability integrations are available to collect and process your data. Refer to Elastic integrations for more information.