Connect to external Elastic resources

Fields like elasticsearchRef or kibanaRef are useful to automatically establish connections between applications managed by the same ECK operator instance. It is however also possible to connect to applications managed by a different ECK operator instance, or to applications not managed by ECK, for example an Elastic Cloud deployment. This can be done by providing connection details and credentials in a Secret through the secretName attribute:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: external-es-ref
stringData:
  url: <ELASTIC_CLOUD_URL>
  username: "elastic"
  password: REDACTED
---
apiVersion: kibana.k8s.elastic.co/v1
kind: Kibana
metadata:
  name: kibana-sample
spec:
  version: 8.14.0
  count: 1
  elasticsearchRef:
    secretName: external-es-ref

In the case of Elastic Agent you can also specify several named references:

apiVersion: v1
kind: Secret
metadata:
  name: external-es-ref
stringData:
  url: <ELASTIC-CLOUD-URL>:443
  username: ""
  password: ""
  api-key: REDACTED
  ca.crt: REDACTED

apiVersion: agent.k8s.elastic.co/v1alpha1
kind: Agent
metadata:
  name: quickstart
spec:
  version: 9.5.6
  elasticsearchRefs:
  - outputName: default
    secretName: external-es-ref
  - outputName: monitoring
    secretName: external-es-ref2

The following fields are expected to be set in the referenced Secret:

• url (required): URL to be used to access the external resource.
• username (required): The username of the user to be authenticated to the Elastic resource.
• password (required): The password for the provided user.
• ca.crt (optional): The certificate authority to be used to connect to the external resource.

In the case of Agent and Beats resources the following field can also be used to connect to Elasticsearch:

• api-key: An API key to authenticate against the Elastic resource.