Editor's Note (September 7, 2018): This post refers to X-Pack. Starting with the 6.3 release, the X-Pack code is now open and fully integrated as features into the Elastic Stack.

Never one to rest after a major release, we are pleased to make the first public alpha of 6.0 available today.

At Elastic{ON} 2017 each of the individual projects talked about their current roadmap and the plans for 6.0 and it is incredibly compelling to begin seeing that work come to fruition.

Before you get too excited, keep in mind that this is still an alpha so don ’ t put it into production. There is no guarantee that any of the 6.0.0-alpha1 versions will be compatible with other pre-releases, or the 6.0.0 GA. We strongly recommend that you keep this far, far away from production. And, since it is an alpha, it is not available on Elastic Cloud.

During the 5.0 release we introduced the Elastic Pioneer Program and will continue that same program with this release.

What is the Elastic Pioneer Program?

We ’ re very excited about these upcoming Elastic Stack Version 6.0 releases, but we want to make sure they ’ re perfect (or as perfect as software gets) before they ship more broadly. Everyone who reports a legitimate bug on the pre-release of the software will be recognized for the wider release, and receive a special Elastic gift package as our thank you.

How to participate

To join the program, just try out the pre-release of any (preferably, every) part of the Elastic Stack, and open issues as you find them in the appropriate repo (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Beats, Kibana) or forum (X-Pack). When you open an issue, mention that you found the bug in 6.0.0-alpha1/alphaN/betaY, and we ’ ll add a “ Pioneer Program ” label. While we appreciate the information, duplicate issues won ’ t enter you into the program.

Known Issues: As a heads-up, and proof this is an early preview release, there are a few known issues you should be aware of. These are enumerated in each section below.

Elasticsearch

For more detailed information, and many other features, peruse the Elasticsearch detail post.

Rolling restarts from 5.latest to 6.0 - That statement, alone, could be the only bullet point included.

Keeping with the theme established above, Cross Cluster Search is supported across major versions.

Types are going away. Only a single type is allowed in new indices and the _type field has been removed.

field has been removed. Lucene 7 brings support for sparse doc values an alternative encoding format.

Sort your data at index time vs. search time with Index sorting.

Protip: Don ’ t forget to check your deprecation logs before upgrading!

Kibana

‘ Visualize ’ all the features, and ‘ Discover ’ more information in the detail post.

6.0.0-alpha1 release sets the groundwork for compatibility with the rest of the 6.0.0 stack. Keep an eye on these preview releases for many more new features.

Known Issues:

Machine Learning

Unable to clone a job

Unable to display Explorer top anomaly charts

Machine Learning was released in Beta in 5.4. If you interested in finding anomalies in your time series data, please continue to test with that release.

Watcher UI If you have watches that were created in an earlier version, this will cause all pages in Watcher UI to throw an error and be unusable.

Logstash

For more information, grok the detail post.

Introducing a new representation for Logstash pipelines. This sets the groundwork for future pipeline visualizations

The GeoIP filter supports commercial databases!

Beats

We don ’ t ‘ let the beat drop ’ but we drop the updates in a detail post.

Open source collaboration matters. Both Filebeat and Metricbeat now have integrations with Kubernetes to collect, and enhance, pod logs and metrics.

More Metricbeat modules including memcached, perfmon, dropwizard, HTTP, vSphere, Elasticsearch, and Kibana.

Known Issues

On macOS the importdashboards program might fail when unpacking the dashboards zip file. You can workaround it by running ulimit -n 2048 just before running the importdashboards program.

ES-Hadoop

ES-Hadoop 6.0.0-alpha1 has also been released today.

Get It Now!