Manage API keys

Elastic Stack ECE ECK Elastic Cloud Hosted Self Managed Serverless

API keys are security mechanisms used to authenticate and authorize access to your deployments and Elasticsearch resources.

They ensure that only authorized users or applications interact with these resources through Elastic APIs.

For example, if you extract data from an Elasticsearch cluster on a daily basis, you might create an API key tied to your credentials, configure it with minimum access, and then put the API credentials into a cron job. Or you might create API keys to automate ingestion of new data from remote sources, without a live user interaction.

Depending on the APIs you want to use, the API keys to create are different, and managed at different locations:

• Elasticsearch API keys, to use Elasticsearch and Kibana APIs, and to manage remote cluster connections.
• Serverless project API keys, to use Elasticsearch and Kibana serverless APIs.
• Elastic Cloud API keys, to manage your Elastic Cloud organization, Elastic Cloud Hosted deployments, and serverless projects using the Elastic Cloud and Elastic Cloud serverless APIs.
• Elastic Cloud Enterprise API keys, to manage your Elastic Cloud Enterprise platform and deployments using the Elastic Cloud Enterprise API.