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Elasticsearch data source

Grafana ships with built-in support for Elasticsearch. You can make many types of queries to visualize logs or metrics stored in Elasticsearch, and annotate graphs with log events stored in Elasticsearch.

This topic explains configuring and querying specific to the Elasticsearch data source. For general documentation on querying data sources in Grafana, see Query and transform data.

For instructions on how to add a data source to Grafana, refer to the administration documentation. Only users with the organization administrator role can add data sources. Administrators can also configure the data source via YAML with Grafana’s provisioning system.

Once you’ve added the Elasticsearch data source, you can configure it so that your Grafana instance’s users can create queries in its query editor when they build dashboards and use Explore.

Supported Elasticsearch versions

This data source supports these versions of Elasticsearch:

  • v7.10+
  • v8.0+ (experimental)

Configure the data source

To access the data source configuration page:

  1. Hover the cursor over the Configuration (gear) icon.
  2. Select Data Sources.
  3. Select the Elasticsearch data source.

Set the data source’s basic configuration options carefully:

NameDescription
NameSets the name you use to refer to the data source in panels and queries.
DefaultSets the data source that’s pre-selected for new panels.
UrlSets the HTTP protocol, IP, and port of your Elasticsearch server.
AccessDon’t modify Access. Use “Server (default)” or the data source won’t work.

You must also configure settings specific to the Elasticsearch data source.

Index settings

Elasticsearch data source details
Elasticsearch data source details

Use the index settings to specify a default for the time field and your Elasticsearch index’s name. You can use a time pattern, such as YYYY.MM.DD, or a wildcard for the index name.

Elasticsearch version

Select the version of your Elasticsearch data source from the version selection dropdown. Different versions provide different query compositions and functionalities in the query editor. Available Elasticsearch versions are 2.x, 5.x, 5.6+, 6.0+, 7.0+, 7.7+, and 7.10+.

Grafana assumes you’re running the lowest possible version for a specified range. This ensures that new features or breaking changes in a future Elasticsearch release don’t affect your configuration.

For example, if you run Elasticsearch 7.6.1 and select 7.0+, and a new feature is made available for Elasticsearch 7.5.0 or newer releases, then a 7.5+ option will be available. However, your configuration won’t be affected until you explicitly select the new 7.5+ option in your settings.

Configure Min time interval

The Min time interval setting defines a lower limit for the auto group-by time interval.

This value must be formatted as a number followed by a valid time identifier:

IdentifierDescription
yyear
Mmonth
wweek
dday
hhour
mminute
ssecond
msmillisecond

We recommend setting this value to match your Elasticsearch write frequency. For example, set this to 1m if Elasticsearch writes data every minute.

You can also override this setting in a dashboard panel under its data source options.

X-Pack enabled

Toggle this to enable X-Pack-specific features and options, which provide the query editor with additional aggregations, such as Rate and Top Metrics.

Include frozen indices

When the “X-Pack enabled” setting is active and the configured Elasticsearch version is higher than 6.6.0, you can configure Grafana to not ignore frozen indices when performing search requests.

Note: Frozen indices are deprecated in Elasticsearch since v7.14.

Logs

You can optionally configure the two Logs parameters Message field name and Level field name to determine which fields the data source uses for log messages and log levels when visualizing logs in Explore.

For example, if you’re using a default setup of Filebeat for shipping logs to Elasticsearch, set:

  • Message field name: message
  • Level field name: fields.level

Data links create a link from a specified field that can be accessed in Explore’s logs view.

Each data link configuration consists of:

ParameterDescription
FieldSets the name of the field used by the data link.
URL/querySets the full link URL if the link is external. If the link is internal, this input serves as a query for the target data source.
In both cases, you can interpolate the value from the field with the ${__value.raw } macro.
URL Label(Optional) Sets a custom display label for the link. The link label defaults to the full external URL or name of the linked internal data source and is overridden by this setting.
Internal linkSets whether the link is internal or external. For an internal link, you can select the target data source with a data source selector. This supports only tracing data sources.

Configure Amazon Elasticsearch Service

If you use Amazon Elasticsearch Service, you can use Grafana’s Elasticsearch data source to visualize data from it.

If you use an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy to control access to your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain, you must use AWS Signature Version 4 (AWS SigV4) to sign all requests to that domain.

For details on AWS SigV4, refer to the AWS documentation.

AWS Signature Version 4 authentication

Note: Available in Grafana v7.3 and higher.

To sign requests to your Amazon Elasticsearch Service domain, you can enable SigV4 in Grafana’s configuration.

Once AWS SigV4 is enabled, you can configure it on the Elasticsearch data source configuration page. For more information about AWS authentication options, refer to AWS authentication.

SigV4 configuration for AWS Elasticsearch Service
SigV4 configuration for AWS Elasticsearch Service

Provision the data source

You can define and configure the data source in YAML files as part of Grafana’s provisioning system. For more information about provisioning, and for available configuration options, refer to Provisioning Grafana.

Provisioning examples

Basic provisioning:

yaml
apiVersion: 1

datasources:
  - name: Elastic
    type: elasticsearch
    access: proxy
    database: '[metrics-]YYYY.MM.DD'
    url: http://localhost:9200
    jsonData:
      interval: Daily
      timeField: '@timestamp'

Provision for logs:

yaml
apiVersion: 1

datasources:
  - name: elasticsearch-v7-filebeat
    type: elasticsearch
    access: proxy
    database: '[filebeat-]YYYY.MM.DD'
    url: http://localhost:9200
    jsonData:
      interval: Daily
      timeField: '@timestamp'
      esVersion: '7.0.0'
      logMessageField: message
      logLevelField: fields.level
      dataLinks:
        - datasourceUid: my_jaeger_uid # Target UID needs to be known
          field: traceID
          url: '$${__value.raw}' # Careful about the double "$$" because of env var expansion

Query the data source

You can select multiple metrics and group by multiple terms or filters when using the Elasticsearch query editor.

For details, see the query editor documentation.

Use template variables

Instead of hard-coding details such as server, application, and sensor names in metric queries, you can use variables. Grafana lists these variables in dropdown select boxes at the top of the dashboard to help you change the data displayed in your dashboard. Grafana refers to such variables as template variables.

For details, see the template variables documentation.