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Add plugins and extensions in Elastic Cloud Enterprise

On Elastic Cloud Enterprise, you extend Elasticsearch with plugins that the platform provides, custom plugin or configuration bundles, and—in certain cases—additional Kibana plugins.

Refer to Plugins and bundles for options that apply to other deployment types.

Plugins are software packages that you install in Elasticsearch to extend its core functionality, for example with additional analyzers, ingest processors, or field types. Availability depends on your Elasticsearch version. Common purposes include:

  • National language support, phonetic analysis, and extended unicode support
  • Ingesting attachments in common formats and ingesting information about the geographic location of IP addresses
  • Adding new field datatypes to Elasticsearch

You can add plugins to a deployment in one of two ways, depending on whether Elastic Cloud Enterprise provides the plugin or you supply it yourself:

  • Provided with Elastic Cloud Enterprise: Elastic Cloud Enterprise hosts compatible plugins for your Elasticsearch version and upgrades them with your deployment, except when there are breaking changes. You enable the plugins per deployment.

  • Custom bundles and plugins: When you need a plugin that is not built into Elastic Cloud Enterprise, or shared configuration files such as synonym dictionaries or SAML metadata, you reference a ZIP bundle from an HTTP or HTTPS URL. You can also create your own plugins.

Bundles are ZIP files of configuration and data files. They are not installed as plugins. Instead, when a node starts, Elastic Cloud Enterprise makes the bundle contents available in the node's configuration directory.

Use a bundle when every node needs the same files, such as:

  • Synonym, stop-word, or compound-word dictionaries
  • Scripts referenced in queries
  • Cluster configuration files, such as SAML metadata

To prepare and attach a bundle, refer to Add custom bundles and plugins.

Unlike Elastic Cloud Hosted, Elastic Cloud Enterprise supports additional Kibana plugins in certain cases by including them in a custom Kibana Docker image and updating your stack pack. Refer to Include additional Kibana plugins.