Very recently Elastic released their 7.7 version of their Elastic stack! Here are the 5 most impressive new features of this release:
1. New Alerting Framework
Probably the biggest and most exciting new feature is the release of a complete new alerting framework for Elastic Observability and the Elastic Stack. As centralized monitoring and observability becomes more and more important, alerting is a crucial part of your observability strategy (or at least it should be). In this new framework you can define your alerts via a user friendly GUI, instead of creating json files and command. Users can now create alerts directly from the SIEM, APM, Metrics or UpTime applications, as well as directly from an index. In addition, pre-defined actions with third party’s like Slack or Pagerduty are included as well. Personally I’m a huge fan of integrating with Slack and Pagerduty. It simply works really great!
2. Service Maps In Elastic APM
Service Maps in Elastic APM are new in this release. It gives you the ability to create a map of all your microservices (instrumented by Elastic APM) and see how your services are connected. Additionally, it also shows which external services or databases are interacting with your services. Really great feature! Small remark; it is part of a platinum subscription (but you can try it for free for 30-days!).
3. Collecting Metrics From Different Sources
Let’s talk Metrics. With the release of version 7.7, a log of new features are added to collect metrics from different sources. How about integration with:
- Prometheus
- Cloud (AWS,GCP, Azure) monitoring story
- Google Cloud Pub/Sub and Loadbalancer
- Pivotal Cloud Foundry
- Istio
- MQTT (Internet of Things message protocol)
Ultimately, this gives you more and more options to collect data from your entity (IT) organization and store it in one place. This is the best foundation for your observability!
4. Machine Learning To Monitor The Responses
Elastic Observability comes with Elastic APM, UpTime, Logging and Metrics. We already discussed some new features of APM. A cool new feature of Uptime is the possibility to use machine learning to monitor the responses or your Uptime watchers to perform anomaly detection! How great is that!
5. Add Kibana Lens Visuals Directly To Kibana Canvas
Lastly, but not less important, is that from now on you can add your Kibana Lens visuals directly to Kibana Canvas. I’m personally a huge fan of Canvas because it gives you the ability to present (KPI based) data to your (business) users in a really fancy way. Another nice feature is that Elastic gives Elastic Cloud users the opportunity to choose from multiple SSO authentication methods to access your Kibana dashboards! Safety first!
Want to learn more about monitoring?
It is very common for IT departments to be found rushing around looking for the facts in order to resolve problems that have been highlighted by the business. The use of monitoring ensures that you know where the problems lie before the business is even aware of them.