Setting up Marvel
See Chapter 2, Installation and the Requirements for Elasticsearch, for instructions on how to install the Marvel Agent and the Marvel Kibana dashboard.
Marvel stores its metrics data inside Elasticsearch. It is possible to store these metrics alongside production data in the same Elasticsearch cluster; however, this is inadvisable because:
Marvel's data indices can grow quite large and, in a production setting, you won't want these indices affecting the performance of your primary cluster.
If the primary cluster is experiencing issues, having Marvel on a separate cluster will allow you to more easily diagnose those issues.
If Marvel is running on a normal data node, it can inadvertently be configured to collect data on its own metrics indices. For example, if you log in to the Marvel dashboard and start querying the Marvel indices, these queries will then be logged back to the Marvel indices. This is probably not the intended behavior.
For these reasons, this chapter covers...
