Elastic Releases Version 6.5 of the Elastic Stack

New release offers significant stack-level enhancements and features for Infrastructure Monitoring, APM, Kibana Canvas and Spaces, and More

Elastic N.V., the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, announced the general availability of version 6.5 of the Elastic Stack. This release highlights our continued investment in solutions for logging, metrics, and application performance management (APM), and foundational Elastic Stack features that benefit multiple use cases, such as app search, site search, enterprise search, business analytics, and security analytics.

This latest release aims to help users of the Elastic Stack store, manage, and analyze their data more efficiently, scale their operations, and improve how they interact with their data through new user interfaces (UIs), visualizations, and dashboards. 6.5 contains the initial release of our Infrastructure solution and a dedicated UI for log viewing, giving observability teams a more efficient and streamlined way of navigating their data. It also introduces distributed tracing support and the general availability of Java and Go agents in Elastic APM. This release also launches a number of highly awaited Kibana features – Canvas, a powerful way for users to build pixel-perfect infographic experiences on live data and Spaces, a new way for users to group and organize their dashboards and visualizations into “spaces”, and secure access by roles like security, operations, finance, and marketing.

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“Our focus has always been to make users successful in whatever ways they decide to use our technology, on-premises or in the cloud, using the Elastic Stack for a single use case like security or logging, or for many others,” said Shay Banon, founder and CEO of Elastic. “6.5 is a MAJOR.MINOR release, showcasing our relentless execution across multiple usage patterns of our technology, as well as foundational product capabilities that are critical across a variety of use cases.”

Infrastructure Monitoring: New applications for Logs and Metrics Analytics

The Elastic Stack has always enabled powerful ways to analyze logs and metrics from IT infrastructure. The 6.5 release makes it even easier for users to gain visibility into operational data. The introduction of an Infrastructure monitoring solution provides a 10,000-foot view of physical, virtual, or container-based infrastructure, and allows users to drill into the details of any host, pod, or container, while a new UI for log analysis provides an advanced log viewer with live tail, even on filtered data. 6.5 also includes the first release of Functionbeat, which adds new monitoring capabilities for cloud-based serverless infrastructure like AWS Lambda for collecting data from sources such as CloudWatch Logs and Simple Queue Service (SQS).

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APM: Open Source APM Adds Distributed Tracing and Support for Go and Java

Elastic APM gives users the ability to combine APM data with infrastructure logs, server metrics, and security events to identify bottlenecks and issues faster, all using the same open source foundation that they are already familiar with. In 6.5, we released distributed tracing, a beta feature that allows users to string together transactions and visualize the performance of requests as they flow through an organization’s infrastructure. We also announced the general availability of agents for popular programming languages, Go and Java.

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Kibana: New and Expanded Interactive Experiences with Canvas and Spaces

Kibana has found wide adoption in NOCs, SOCs and boardrooms to visualize and explore data stored in Elasticsearch. In 6.5, we’ve released two major features that make it easier to share and collaborate within Kibana. Canvas allows users to create live data presentations and pixel-perfect workpads in new interactive ways for their teams, including operations, business, and executive users. Kibana users with 100s and 1,000s of dashboards and visualizations, can use the new Kibana spaces feature to group collections of Kibana objects into “spaces” such as, a logging space, marketing space, etc. and then define role-based access permissions and privileges for each space.

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Other significant developments in the Elastic Stack 6.5 include a major focus on usability, with enhancements and new features like:

• Cross-cluster replication (beta). Users can replicate indices from one cluster to another cluster. Use cases include high availability/disaster recovery, geo proximity/data locality, and centralized search/analysis.
• Rollup support in Kibana (beta). Now it is easier than ever to dramatically shrink the storage requirements for metrics data, by summarizing the data intelligently at lower granularity. 6.5 includes support for configuring rollup jobs and for visualizing the rolled up data.
• Interactive file import (beta). This free feature in the Machine Learning application allows the easy import of data into the Elastic Stack. When uploading a file, the file type is automatically detected, and grok patterns are suggested dynamically. This dramatically simplifies the process of onboarding new data sources or importing specific data sets.
• New machine learning functionality. Improvements in multi-bucket anomalies; now with improved underlying modeling methods, anomalies can be detected more accurately.

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