Type to search.

Deploy Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure

Serverless Observability Preview

Elastic Cloud Serverless projects are autoscaled environments, fully managed by Elastic and available on Elastic Cloud.

Availability

  • Preview

    This functionality is in technical preview and is ready for evaluation. Use with caution in production; it is not recommended for mission-critical workloads. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features. Specific Support terms apply.

Serverless Security Preview

Elastic Cloud Serverless projects are autoscaled environments, fully managed by Elastic and available on Elastic Cloud.

Availability

  • Preview

    This functionality is in technical preview and is ready for evaluation. Use with caution in production; it is not recommended for mission-critical workloads. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features. Specific Support terms apply.

Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure Preview 0.7+

Availability

  • Preview since 0.7

    This functionality is in technical preview and is ready for evaluation. Use with caution in production; it is not recommended for mission-critical workloads. Elastic will work to fix any issues, but features in technical preview are not subject to the support SLA of official GA features. Specific Support terms apply.

Follow these steps to deploy Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure in a resource group to send telemetry data to the Elastic Cloud Managed OTLP Endpoint endpoint.

You can deploy Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure automatically with Deploy to Azure:

Deploy to Azure

This opens the Azure portal with the Bicep template pre-filled. You can then configure the parameters and deploy the template. In the Essentials step, the Encoding section lets you select the logs encoding mode. You can also download the Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure Bicep template.

  1. Create the resource group

    Create the resource group that hosts all the resources for Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure.

    Shell 
    az group create --name <resource_group_name> --location <azure_region>

  2. Download the Bicep template

    Download the Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure Bicep template.

  3. Deploy the Bicep template

    Deploy the Bicep template using the following command:

    Shell 
    az deployment group create \
    --resource-group <resource_group_name> \
    --template-file ecf.bicep \
    --parameters \
        otlpEndpoint=<otlp_endpoint> \
        elasticApiKey=<elastic_api_key> \
        logsEncodingExtension=<encoding> \
    1. The OTLP endpoint is the URL of the Elasticsearch OTLP endpoint. Refer to Prerequisites.
    2. The Elastic API key is the API key for authentication. Refer to Prerequisites.
    3. Optional. The logs encoding extension to use. Use azure_encoding (default) for OTel Native format, or beats_encoding for ECS format.

    For a complete list of parameters, refer to Configure Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure.

Once Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure is deployed, configure the Azure side to stream telemetry to the Event Hubs created by the deployment. Each signal has its own setup steps:

  • Logs — set up Diagnostic Settings to stream Activity logs and resource logs.
  • Metrics — set up Data Collection Rules or Diagnostic Settings for platform metrics.

To upgrade an existing Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure deployment to a later version, refer to Upgrade Elastic Cloud Forwarder for Azure.

If you no longer need the resources and want to remove them, use the following command:

Shell 
az group delete --name <resource_group_name>

This removes all the resources in the resource group.

Warning

If you remove the resource group, data that's still unprocessed will be lost.