This lab was developed with our partner, Elastic. Your personal information may be shared with Elastic, the lab sponsor, if you have opted in to receive product updates, announcements, and offers in your Account Profile.

Note: This lab requires a partner account. Please follow the lab instructions to create your account before starting the lab.

GSP817

Overview

Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with a HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents.

In this lab you will focus on creating a simple Elasticsearch deployment, leveraging Google Cloud Platform. Once you have created your Elastic cluster you will explore a sample dataset and visualize the data in a dashboard.

Objectives

In this lab, you learn how to perform the following tasks:

• Create an Elasticsearch deployment on the Google Cloud Platform
• Explore data in Elastic through dashboards and more

Prerequisites

This is an introductory lab. No prior knowledge of Elastic and its various products and features are required, though basic system configuration, such as knowing how to run commands via. a Linux based command line, and editing text files using a Unix based text editor is advantageous, i.e. Vim.

Setup and requirements

Before you click the Start Lab button

Read these instructions. Labs are timed and you cannot pause them. The timer, which starts when you click Start Lab, shows how long Google Cloud resources are made available to you.

This hands-on lab lets you do the lab activities in a real cloud environment, not in a simulation or demo environment. It does so by giving you new, temporary credentials you use to sign in and access Google Cloud for the duration of the lab.

To complete this lab, you need:

• Access to a standard internet browser (Chrome browser recommended).

Note: Use an Incognito (recommended) or private browser window to run this lab. This prevents conflicts between your personal account and the student account, which may cause extra charges incurred to your personal account.

• Time to complete the lab—remember, once you start, you cannot pause a lab.

Note: Use only the student account for this lab. If you use a different Google Cloud account, you may incur charges to that account.

How to start your lab and sign in to the Google Cloud console

1. Click the Start Lab button. If you need to pay for the lab, a dialog opens for you to select your payment method. On the left is the Lab Details pane with the following:

   • The Open Google Cloud console button
   • Time remaining
   • The temporary credentials that you must use for this lab
   • Other information, if needed, to step through this lab

2. Click Open Google Cloud console (or right-click and select Open Link in Incognito Window if you are running the Chrome browser).

   The lab spins up resources, and then opens another tab that shows the Sign in page.

   Tip: Arrange the tabs in separate windows, side-by-side.

   Note: If you see the Choose an account dialog, click Use Another Account.

3. If necessary, copy the Username below and paste it into the Sign in dialog.

   {{{user_0.username | "Username"}}}

   You can also find the Username in the Lab Details pane.

4. Click Next.

5. Copy the Password below and paste it into the Welcome dialog.

   {{{user_0.password | "Password"}}}

   You can also find the Password in the Lab Details pane.

6. Click Next.

   Important: You must use the credentials the lab provides you. Do not use your Google Cloud account credentials. Note: Using your own Google Cloud account for this lab may incur extra charges.

7. Click through the subsequent pages:

   • Accept the terms and conditions.
   • Do not add recovery options or two-factor authentication (because this is a temporary account).
   • Do not sign up for free trials.

After a few moments, the Google Cloud console opens in this tab.

Note: To access Google Cloud products and services, click the Navigation menu or type the service or product name in the Search field.

Activate Cloud Shell

Cloud Shell is a virtual machine that is loaded with development tools. It offers a persistent 5GB home directory and runs on the Google Cloud. Cloud Shell provides command-line access to your Google Cloud resources.

1. Click Activate Cloud Shell at the top of the Google Cloud console.

2. Click through the following windows:

   • Continue through the Cloud Shell information window.
   • Authorize Cloud Shell to use your credentials to make Google Cloud API calls.

When you are connected, you are already authenticated, and the project is set to your Project_ID, . The output contains a line that declares the Project_ID for this session:

Your Cloud Platform project in this session is set to {{{project_0.project_id | "PROJECT_ID"}}}

gcloud is the command-line tool for Google Cloud. It comes pre-installed on Cloud Shell and supports tab-completion.

3. (Optional) You can list the active account name with this command:

gcloud auth list

4. Click Authorize.

Output:

ACTIVE: * ACCOUNT: {{{user_0.username | "ACCOUNT"}}} To set the active account, run: $ gcloud config set account `ACCOUNT`

5. (Optional) You can list the project ID with this command:

gcloud config list project

Output:

[core] project = {{{project_0.project_id | "PROJECT_ID"}}} Note: For full documentation of gcloud, in Google Cloud, refer to the gcloud CLI overview guide.

Task 1. Elastic - Set up trial account

1.1 Sign up for a free trial.

• Click Start free trial.

• Sign up using your personal email and a unique password. Do NOT click the "sign up with Google" button, click sign up with Email.

Note: You must use your personal email, not your student account, don't attempt to sign up with google, unless you sign out of your lab account first. If you attempt to sign up with your student id, your trial will be rejected or canceled.

1.2 Enter some details about yourself.

1.3 Select use case as Elasticsearch.

1.4 Select the Deployment type as Elastic Cloud Hosted.

1.5 Click Launch.

Note: The deployment can take up to 5 minutes.

1.6 Set the index name as my-index.

1.7 Click Create my index.

Task 2. Elastic - explore sample data

2.1 Select Dashboards in the left-hand navigation menu.

2.2 Click Create data view.

2.3 Set a Name for the data view.

2.4 Enter my-index in the Index pattern field. This is the index you created earlier.

2.5 Click Save data view to Kibana.

2.6 Click the Add some sample data link, located just above the Create a dashboard button.

2.7 Click Start exploring.

Note: If you prefer to explore your own data, select Upload file.

2.8 Select the use case that is the most relevant to you. The remainder of the lab will follow the Observability → Log analytics use case.

2.9 Expand one of the transactions to see the fields you have to work with.

Task 3. Create a simple dashboard

3.1 Select Analytics → Dashboards.

3.2 Select Dashboards in the top-left corner.

3.3 Select the dashboard that is the most relevant to you. This lab will use the [Logs] Web Traffic dashboard.

3.4 Explore the dashboard and customize it.

Congratulations!

In this lab, you have created an Elasticsearch deployment on the Google Cloud Platform and explored data in Elastic through dashboards.

Next steps / Learn more

• Elastic on the Google Cloud Marketplace!
• Elastic Cloud offers a fully managed experience so that you can focus on your data instead of managing the cluster. You can check it out here and play with a free trial.
• Check out the Elastic Integrations page and see how easily you can stream in logs, metrics, traces, content, and more from your apps, endpoints, infrastructure, cloud, network, workplace tools, and every other common source in your ecosystem.
• Leverage the out-of-the-box solutions to give your Elastic project a jump start!

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Manual Last Updated November 17, 2025

Lab Last Tested November 17, 2025

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