Elastic Cloud on Kubernetes (ECK) 1.7 simplifies the monitoring of the Elastic Stack by allowing users to specify a reference to a monitoring cluster, which automatically sets up sidecar containers to ship logs and metrics to the designated Elasticsearch cluster. This update reduces the complexity associated with Beats configuration and Kubernetes role-based access control. Users can deploy ECK in Kubernetes, set up a monitoring cluster first, and then link a production cluster to it by referencing the monitoring Elasticsearch cluster in the specification. ECK also provides out-of-the-box Kibana alerts based on best practices, although users can customize these alerts to suit their needs. However, it's important to note that the monitoring cluster must be separate and managed by ECK within the same Kubernetes cluster as the monitored cluster, as an Elasticsearch cluster cannot monitor itself.