Moving beyond KPIs
The process of selecting KPIs, in general, should be relatively easy, as it is likely obvious what metrics are the best indicators (if online sales are down, then the application is likely not working). But if we want to get a more holistic view of what may be contributing to an operational problem, we must expand our analysis beyond the KPIs to indicators that emanate from the underlying systems and technology that support the application.
Fortunately, there are a plethora of ways to collect all kinds of data for centralization in the Elastic Stack. The Elastic Agent, for example, is a single, unified agent that you can deploy to hosts or containers to collect data and send it to the Elastic Stack. Behind the scenes, the Elastic Agent runs the Beats shippers or Elastic Endpoint required for your configuration. Starting from version 7.11, the Elastic Agent is managed in Kibana in the Fleet user interface and can be used to add and manage integrations for popular...