Elasticsearch Marvel: Monitor and Manage your Elasticsearch cluster
Elasticsearch have just announced an amazing new product: Elasticsearch Marvel. Marvel is a monitoring and cluster management dashboard enabling you to understand and visualize the health and status of your Elasticsearch infrastructure.
It's a feature that has frequently been requested at Elasticsearch meetups, so it's great news to all users of elasticsearch that this feature is available to download and try now. I wasn't expecting any major anoucements like this so soon before the launch of Elasticsearch v1.0, which we are assured is dropping very, very soon.
"Elasticsearch is a really complex system that tries really hard to hide it. But sometimes you need to know how Elasticsearch is working. Marvel monitors the heartbeat of your cluster, it give you insight into the health of your entire Elasticsearch infrastructure."
Marvel is built on completly open source components. Kibana powers the main visualisations, and Sense is included to give you easy access to the REST API. It's free to use in development and is very competitivly priced to use in production.
Install Elasticsearch Marvel
Installation is simple, and available from version 0.90.9 onwards. From your elasticsearch installation directory, run:
./bin/plugin -i elasticsearch/marvel/latest
-> Installing elasticsearch/marvel/latest...
Trying http://download.elasticsearch.org/elasticsearch/marvel/marvel-latest.zip...
Downloading ....DONE
Installed elasticsearch/marvel/latest into /usr/local/var/lib/elasticsearch/plugins/marvel-latestNext, restart this node.
You may want to temporarily disable allocation
Now, in your browser visit http://localhost:9200/_plugin/marvel/ and follow the instructions on screen :)
Using Elasticsearch Marvel
I can't post any of my own screenshots here because I'm far too sensible to disclose such detailed information of my production clusters ;) But see below for what to expect.
Marvel comes with plenty of configuration options: check out the technical documentation for full details.
I'm really pleased to see the Elasticsearch core team supporting more products that enable the wider adoption of the Elasticsearch stack: Their momentum over the past 6 months has been astonishing. Marvel will be a tool that I have open always, and whilst I'm sure I will still use the existing monitoring plugins like Elasticsearch Head, Elastic HQ and Bigdesk, Marvel provides new depths of insight in a single tool.
Update: Since, publishing this post Boaz Leskes has written a post over at the Elasticsearch blog called "Why we built Marvel". I highly recommend it as furthur reading :)