Ingesting data into {{es}}

Bring your data! Whether you call it adding, indexing, or ingesting data, you have to get the data into Elasticsearch before you can search it, visualize it, and use it for insights.

Our ingest tools are flexible, and support a wide range of scenarios. We can help you with everything from popular and straightforward use cases, all the way to advanced use cases that require additional processing in order to modify or reshape your data before it goes to Elasticsearch.

You can ingest:

  • General content (data without timestamps), such as HTML pages, catalogs, and files
  • Timestamped (time series) data, such as logs, metrics, and traces for Elastic Security, Observability, Search solutions, or for your own custom solutions

Ingesting general content ¶

Elastic offer tools designed to ingest specific types of general content. The content type determines the best ingest option.

  • To index documents directly into Elasticsearch, use the Elasticsearch document APIs.
  • To send application data directly to Elasticsearch, use an Elasticsearch language client.
  • To index web page content, use the Elastic web crawler.
  • To sync data from third-party sources, use connectors. A connector syncs content from an original data source to an Elasticsearch index. Using connectors you can create searchable, read-only replicas of your data sources.
  • To index single files for testing in a non-production environment, use the Kibana file uploader.

If you would like to try things out before you add your own data, try using our sample data.

Ingesting time-stamped data ¶

What’s the best approach for ingesting time-stamped data?

The best approach for ingesting data is the simplest option that meets your needs and satisfies your use case.

In most cases, the simplest option for ingesting timestamped data is using Elastic Agent paired with an Elastic integration.

Integrations are available for many popular platforms and services, and are a good place to start for ingesting data into Elastic solutions—​Observability, Security, and Search—​or your own search application.

Check out the Integration quick reference to search for available integrations. If you don’t find an integration for your data source or if you need additional processing to extend the integration, we still have you covered. Check out additional processing for a sneak peek.