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How to use the documentation

Stack Serverless

Our documentation is organized to guide you through your journey with Elastic, from learning the basics to deploying and managing complex solutions.

Here is a detailed breakdown of the documentation structure:

  • Elastic fundamentals: Understand the basics about the deployment options, platform, solutions, and features of the documentation.
  • Solutions and use cases: Learn use cases, evaluate, and implement Elastic's solutions: Observability, Search, and Security.
  • Manage data: Learn about data store primitives, ingestion and enrichment, managing the data lifecycle, and migrating data.
  • Explore and analyze: Get value from data through querying, visualization, machine learning, and alerting.
  • Deploy and manage: Deploy and manage production-ready clusters. Covers deployment options and maintenance tasks.
  • Manage your Cloud account: A dedicated section for user-facing cloud account tasks like resetting passwords.
  • Troubleshoot: Identify and resolve problems.
  • Extend and contribute: How to contribute to or integrate with Elastic, from open source to plugins to integrations.
  • Release notes: Contains release notes and changelogs for each new release.
  • Reference: Reference material for core tasks and manuals for other Elastic products.

Because you can deploy Elastic products in different ways (like on Elastic Cloud or in your own data center) and have different versions, not all documentation applies to every user. To help you quickly see if a topic is relevant to your situation, we use applicability badges.

These badges appear at the top of a page or section and tell you which products, deployment models, and versions the content applies to. They also indicate the maturity level of a feature, such as beta, technical preview, or generally available (GA). This system ensures that you can identify content specific to your environment and version.

Tip

A Stack badge indicates that a page applies to Elastic Stack components across all deployment options except Elastic Cloud Serverless. If a page applies to all deployment options, it will have Serverless and Stack badges.

On each documentation page, you'll find several links that allow you to interact with the content:

  • View as Markdown: This link shows you the raw Markdown source code for the page you're viewing. This can be helpful if you want to reuse the source or feed the document to AI.
  • Edit this page: Selecting this link will take you directly to the page's source file in its GitHub repository. From there, you can propose edits, which our team will review.
  • Report an issue: If you've found a problem, like a typo, a technical error, or confusing content, but don't want to edit the page yourself, use this link. It will open a new issue in our GitHub repository, pre-filled with information about the page you were on, so you can describe the problem in detail.

Starting with Elastic Stack 9.0, Elastic no longer publishes separate documentation sets for each minor release. Instead, all changes in the 9.x series are included in a single, continuously updated documentation set.

This approach helps:

  • Reduce duplicate pages.
  • Show the full history and context of a feature.
  • Simplify search and navigation.

We clearly mark content added or changed in a specific version using availability badges. The availability badges appear in page headers, section headers, and inline.

Stack 9.1.0

This means the feature is:

  • Generally Available (GA) in the Elastic Stack across all deployment options except Elastic Cloud Serverless
  • Introduced in version 9.1.0
Tip

If a page applies to all deployment options including Elastic Cloud Serverless, it will have both Serverless and Stack badges.

Serverless Serverless Security Beta

This means the feature is:

  • Generally Available for Elasticsearch Serverless projects
  • Beta for Elastic Security Serverless projects

ECE Deprecation planned

This means the feature is:

  • Available on Elastic Cloud Enterprise
  • Deprecated starting in version 4.1.0
Tip

Want to learn more about how availability badges are used? Check the Elastic Docs syntax guide.

You can browse documentation for different versions of our products in two ways:

  • Version menu: On most documentation pages, you'll find a version menu. Clicking this menu allows you to switch to a different version of the documentation for the content you are currently viewing.
  • All documentation versions page: For a complete list of all available documentation versions for all Elastic products, you can visit the All documentation versions page.

Find the documentation for your Elastic product versions or releases.

Product Version
Elasticsearch 9.0.0 and later
Kibana 9.0.0 and later
Fleet and Elastic Agent 9.0.0 and later
Logstash 9.0.0 and later
Beats 9.0.0 and later
Elastic Observability 9.0.0 and later
Elastic APM 9.0.0 and later
Elastic Security 9.0.0 and later
Product Version or release
All Elastic Cloud Serverless project types All releases
Elastic Cloud Hosted All releases for January 2025 and later
Elastic Cloud Enterprise 4.0.0 and later
Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes 3.0.0 and later
Product Version or release
Elasticsearch Java Client 9.0.0 and later
Elasticsearch JavaScript Client 9.0.0 and later
Elasticsearch .NET Client 9.0.0 and later
Elasticsearch PHP Client 9.0.0 and later
Elasticsearch Python Client 9.0.0 and later
Elasticsearch Ruby Client 9.0.0 and later
Elastic Common Schema (ECS) 9.0.0 and later
ECS Logging .NET library 8.18.1 and later
ECS Logging Go (Logrus) library 1.0.0 and later
ECS Logging Go (Zap) library 1.0.3 and later
ECS Logging Go (Zerolog) library 0.2.0 and later
ECS Logging Java library 1.x and later
ECS Logging Node.js library 1.5.3 and later
ECS Logging PHP library 2.0.0 and later
ECS Logging Python library 2.2.0 and later
ECS Logging Ruby library 1.0.0 and later
Elasticsearch for Apache Hadoop 9.0.0 and later
Elasticsearch Curator 8.0.0 and later
Elastic Cloud Control (ECCTL) 1.14.0 and later
Elastic Serverless Forwarder for AWS 1.20.1 and later
Elastic integrations All versions
Search UI JavaScript library 1.24.0 and later

To help you understand the terminology used throughout our documentation, we provide a glossary of common Elastic terms. This is a great resource for new users or anyone looking to clarify the meaning of a specific term.

We value contributions from our community. For detailed instructions on how to contribute to both the main documentation and the API references, refer to our contribution guide.