When you use the managed Elasticsearch service on AWS, you usually choose an encrypted connection (via KMS-managed keys), which means you can’t use just any tool to connect to your Elasticsearch cluster. In fact, in order to manually execute commands the easiest option is to use the built-in Kibana and its dev tools.
However, connecting to Kibana is also not trivial due to typical security precautions. Elasticsearch can be run outside or inside a VPC. If you run it outside a VPC, you have to modify its access policy to allow connections from a set of IPs (e.g. your office network).
But if you run it inside a VPC (which is recommended), you have to connect to the VPC. And you have a lot of options for that, but all of them are rather complicated and sometimes even introduce additional cost.
A much simpler approach is to connect via SSH to a machine in the VPC (typically your bastion/jump host) and use it as a SOCKS proxy for your browser. The steps are:
- Open an SSH tunnel. If you are using Windows, you can do it with PuTTy. On Linux, you can use
ssh–$ ssh -D 1337 -q -C -N user@yourdomain.com - Set the SOCKS proxy in the browser. On Firefox, open Options and type “SOCKS”, you’ll have only one option (in Network options) to choose, and then set localhost, 1337 (or whatever port you’ve chosen). Here are the instruction for Chrome (or you can use a plugin)
- Open the Kibana URL in the browser. Note that now all your browser traffic will go through your VPC, so depending on the VPC configuration other websites might not work.
That’s it, a quick tip that might potentially save a lot of time trying to get a VPC connection to work.
Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Bozhidar Bozhanov, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: Connecting to Kibana Within an AWS VPC Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
