[[xpack-monitoring]]
= Monitoring the Elastic Stack

[partintro]
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The {monitoring} components enable you to easily monitor the Elastic Stack
from {kibana-ref}/introduction.html[Kibana].
You can view health and performance data for {es}, Logstash, and {kib} in real
time, as well as analyze past performance.

A monitoring agent runs on each {es}, {kib}, and Logstash instance to collect
and index metrics.

By default, metrics are indexed within the cluster you are monitoring.
Setting up a dedicated monitoring cluster ensures you can access historical
monitoring data even if the cluster you're
monitoring goes down. It also enables you to monitor multiple clusters
from a central location.

When you use a dedicated monitoring cluster, the metrics collected by the
Logstash and Kibana monitoring agents are shipped to the Elasticsearch
cluster you're monitoring, which then forwards all of the metrics to
the monitoring cluster.

// &nbsp;

// image:monitoring-architecture.png["Monitoring Architecture",link="images/monitoring-architecture.png"]

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include::getting-started.asciidoc[]
