In order to activate all the X-Pack paid features, we need to enable the trial account, which is valid for 30 days. Let's go ahead and activate it.

Click on the Management icon on the left-hand side menu and click on License Management. Then, click on Start Trial, as follows:

Click on the Start my Trial button in the resultant popup, as follows:

On successful activation, you should see the status of the license as Active. At any point in time before the trial ends, you can go ahead and revert back to the basic license by clicking on the Revert to Basic button:

Open elasticsearch.yml, which can be found under the $ES_HOME/config folder, and add the following line at the end of the file to enable X-Pack and restart Elasticsearch and Kibana:

xpack.security.enabled: true

Now, when you try to access Elasticsearch via http://localhost:9200, the user will be prompted for login credentials, as shown in the following screenshot:

Similarly, if you see the logs of Kibana in the Terminal, it would fail to connect to Elasticsearch due to authentication issues and won't come up until we set the right credentials in the kibana.yml file.

Go ahead and stop Kibana. Let Elasticsearch run. Now that X-Pack is enabled and security is in place, how do we know what credentials to use to log in? We will look at this in the next section.