Elastic has announced an experimental release of its Elastic Agent and Ingest Manager, designed to simplify data onboarding into the Elastic Stack. The Elastic Agent consolidates various functions into a single, unified agent for easier installation and management, reducing the complexity of deploying multiple Beats and agents across infrastructure. Ingest Manager, a new Kibana application, allows users to quickly add and manage integrations for popular services through a web-based UI, offering out-of-the-box assets like dashboards and visualizations. The release aims to enhance ease of configuration and management at scale, with a focus on automating processes that previously required manual editing of YAML files and use of third-party tools. Although this is an experimental release without a migration path for future iterations, it showcases Elastic's vision for advancing data ingestion, and users are encouraged to test it in dedicated environments to avoid conflicts with future updates.