[role="xpack"]
[[xpack-monitoring]]
= Stack Monitoring

[partintro]
--

The {kib} {monitor-features} serve two separate purposes:

. To visualize monitoring data from across the {stack}. You can view health and 
performance data for {es}, {ls}, {ents}, APM, and Beats in real time,
as well as analyze past performance. 
. To monitor {kib} itself and route that data to the monitoring cluster.

If you enable monitoring across the {stack}, each monitored component is
considered unique based on its persistent UUID, which is written to the
<<settings,`path.data`>> directory when the node or instance starts. 

For more information, see <<configuring-monitoring>> and 
{ref}/monitor-elasticsearch-cluster.html[Monitor a cluster].

Want to monitor your fleet of {agent}s, too? Use {fleet} instead of the Stack
Monitoring UI. To learn more, refer to
{fleet-guide}/monitor-elastic-agent.html[Monitor {agent}s].

--