SkyWalking is a distributed application performance monitoring (APM) tool and a distributed tracing system. This topic describes how to use SkyWalking to monitor an Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch V7.4 cluster.
Background information
- SkyWalking provides auto instrument agents so that you do not need to modify the application code.
- SkyWalking provides manual instrument agents that support OpenTracing SDKs. The manual
instrument agents can monitor the components supported by OpenTracing API for Java.
Note For more information about the components supported by OpenTracing API for Java, see OpenTracing Registry.
- Auto and manual instrument agents can be used at the same time. Manual instrument agents can monitor the components that are not supported by auto instrument agents, and even private components.
- SkyWalking is a Java-based backend program for analytics. It provides RESTful APIs and analytics capabilities for agents of other languages.
- SkyWalking provides high-performance streaming analytics.

SkyWalking is a platform for storing data analytics and measurement results. These results are submitted to SkyWalking Collector over HTTP or gRPC. SkyWalking Collector analyzes and aggregates data and stores the data in Elasticsearch, H2, MySQL, or TiDB. You can view the analysis results on the SkyWalking UI. SkyWalking collects data in different formats from multiple sources, such as SkyWalking agents in different programming languages, Zipkin v1, Zipkin v2, Istio telemetry, and Envoy.
Prerequisites
- An Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch cluster is created. In this topic, an Elasticsearch
V7.4.0 cluster is used.
For more information, see Create an Alibaba Cloud Elasticsearch cluster.
- A Linux server on which JDK 1.8.0 or later is installed is prepared.
We recommend that you use an Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance. For more information about how to purchase an ECS instance, see Step 1: Create an ECS instance.Note For more information about how to install a JDK, see Step 3: Install the JDK. If the JDK is not correctly installed and you start SkyWalking to view logs, the error message "Java not found" or "java-xxx: No such file or directory" is reported.
- Ports 8080, 10800, 11800, and 12800 on the Linux server are not occupied.
- The firewall and Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) are disabled for the Linux server.