Elastic has announced the general availability of external collection for Elastic Stack Monitoring via Metricbeat, which enhances the reliability and flexibility of monitoring Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, APM server, and Beats. This new approach allows monitoring data to be collected and sent directly to the monitoring cluster through Metricbeat, eliminating the need to route it through the production cluster, thus reducing the workload on the production system and increasing the resilience of the monitoring setup. Previously, internal collection required services to gather and ship their own data, often through the production cluster, which was not ideal during times of duress. The introduction of external collection simplifies the process of monitoring Elastic Stack services, and Elastic provides a Migration Wizard to assist current users in transitioning from internal to external collection. Future versions of Elastic Stack will phase out internal collection entirely, and users are encouraged to switch to Metricbeat to ensure preparedness for this transition and to benefit from the improved monitoring capabilities.