Enabling Elastic ML features
The process for enabling Elastic ML features inside the Elastic Stack is slightly different if you are doing so within a self-managed cluster versus using the Elasticsearch Service (ESS) of Elastic Cloud. In short, on a self-managed cluster, the features of ML are enabled via a license key (either a commercial key or a trial key). In ESS, a dedicated ML node needs to be provisioned within the cluster in order to utilize Elastic ML. In the following sections, we will explain the details of how this is accomplished in both scenarios.
Enabling ML on a self-managed cluster
If you have a self-managed cluster that was created from the downloading of Elastic's default distributions of Elasticsearch and Kibana (available at elastic.co/downloads/), enabling Elastic ML features via a license key is very simple. Be sure to not use the Apache 2.0 licensed open source distributions that do not contain the X-Pack code base.
Elastic ML, unlike the bulk...