We recently upgraded from ElasticSearch 2.4.3 to 5.6.2. Below are the steps that we used to install and configure new ELK cluster. ElasticSearch Installation mkdir -p /work/elk/data/data-es562 mkdir -p /work/elk/data/logs-es562 mkdir -p /work/elk/data/repo-es562 cd /work/elk/ curl -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-5.6.2.tar.gz tar -zxvf elasticsearch-5.6.2.tar.gz curl -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/packs/x-pack/x-pack-5.6.2.zip cd /work/elk/elasticsearch-5.6.2 ./bin/elasticsearch-plugin install file:///work/elk/x-pack-5.6.2.zip Configuration Settings for Master + Ingest node in elasticsearch.yml We have reused master nodes as ingest nodes, because we don't have any heavy ingest pipelines, and x-pack monitoring requires at-least one ingest node to be present in the cluster. cluster.name: ESDev562 node.name: "master_01" node.master: true # Enable the node.master role (enabled by default). node.data: false ...