Missing cluster alerts with Metricbeat monitoring if monitoring plugin is disabled

[chrisronline]

Exporters are responsible for creating the watcher-based cluster alerts for monitoring and exporters aren't used in a metricbeat monitoring world.

If a user has an appropriate license for watcher and never configures an exporter, the cluster alert watches are never created.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/es-core-features (:Core/Features/Monitoring)

[chrisronline]

This bug is actually more severe than we originally thought.

Right now (7.6+), users using Metricbeat to collect and ship monitoring data to a separate, dedicated Elasticsearch monitoring cluster will not have cluster alerts available for the production cluster.

Without exporters, the Elasticsearch monitoring plugin will create the necessary monitoring resources, such as index templates, ingest pipelines, and cluster alerts. However, these are only created on the cluster itself (since the Elasticsearch monitoring plugin creates a hidden, local exporter if the monitoring plugin is enabled) which works fine for index templates and ingest pipelines as those only need to exist on the monitoring cluster. For cluster alerts, this hidden, local exporter will create them, but they will be created on the monitoring cluster for the monitoring cluster. What we actually need is for cluster alerts to exist on the monitoring cluster for the production cluster.

Historically, this was done via the http exporter but that is not used with Metricbeat collection.

[dakrone]

Internal monitoring has been deprecated for quite a while, and we're no longer doing any active development on it. I'm going to close this issue.