Enabling Platinum features

At this point, we have an up-and-running Elasticsearch and Kibana installation, which also has the basic feature set enabled. These basic features (described here: https://elastic.co/subscriptions) are value-added features that enhance the operation and functionality of the Elastic Stack over and above the open source version of the Stack or versions found on third-party services (such as the Amazon Elasticsearch service). 

Platinum features, however, provide ever more enterprise-class functionality, such as:

• Security: Allows you to secure the data indexed in the cluster, encrypt the data at the transport level, and audit all access to the cluster
• Alerting: Triggers actions based on condition sets of data or events in the Elasticsearch cluster and beyond
• Monitoring: Provides a complete vision of the operational health of Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash
• Canvas: Allows pixel-perfect infographics driven by dynamic data
• ML: Is of course, the topic of this book

Platinum features can be evaluated out of the box by enabling a trial license. In Kibana, click on Management, then License Management in the Elasticsearch section to reveal the place where a trial license can be enabled:

Simply click the Start trial button to enable ML and the other Platinum features and to agree to the license terms and conditions:

Once this is complete, the licensing screen will indicate that you are in the middle of an active trial of the Platinum features:

An astute observer will notice the following lines being printed to the Elasticsearch log file upon enabling the trial license:

[2018-11-25T10:12:13,175][INFO ][o.e.l.LicenseService     ] [1RGCSTv] license [c1300014-2522-41cb-a0f3-7c5a2bd17f36] mode [trial] - valid

Similar messages occur in the Kibana log:

  log [15:12:13.230] [info][license][xpack] Imported changed license information from Elasticsearch for the [data] cluster: mode: trial | status: active | expiry date: 2018-12-25T10:12:13-05:00
  log [15:12:13.231] [info][kibana-monitoring][monitoring-ui] Starting monitoring stats collection
  log [15:12:38.937] [info][license][xpack] Imported changed license information from Elasticsearch for the [monitoring] cluster: mode: trial | status: active | expiry date: 2018-12-25T10:12:13-05:00

Once this is done, you can start to use Elastic ML right away. Additional configuration steps are needed to take advantage of the other Platinum features (such as Security and Monitoring), but those steps are outside the scope of this book. Consult the Elastic documentation for further assistance on configuring those features.