What is Elastic Stack?
Elastic Stack, or the ELK stack as its also commonly referred to as, is a collection of products from Elastic.
The official Elastic Stack consist of the following:
- E: Elastic Search - Is used for indexing, analyzing and searching the ingested data (ie. from Logstash or even directly)
- L: Logstash - Is used for ingesting, transforming and forwarding data (to Elastic Search)
- K: Kibana - Is used for viewing and visualizing data from Elastic Search
Usually an Elastic Stack is combined with one or more integration components, like MetricBeats for metric collections, FileBeat for log collection etc., or a specific cloud integration, to tailor the setup for a specific need.
Combined, ELK and integration components, serve as a powerfull search and visualization platform.
Apart from the company Elastic them selves, cloud providers like AWS serves the stack as a hosted solution.
Many tends to host the Elastic Stack solution them selves, which allow for a better customization and data management.
When should you use Elastic Stack?
Elastic Stack is usually used for collecting and visualizing logs, but can also be used for monitoring of infrastructure (uptime ect.), APM, Synthetic monitoring or even visualizing geographical location data (eg. based on visitors location data).
The powers of Elastic Stack are many, but from a day-to-day perspective, you would most likely end up spending quite some time in Kibana, using it’s “discover”-feature for searching and filtering through logs.
Kibana also offers an highly customizable dashboard feature, which makes it posible to tailor your own dashboards, place them on a monitor at your office, and your DevOps team can have a near real-time view into your digital environment.
Benefits of using Elastic Stack?
One of the big benefits of using the Elastic Stack, is it’s ability to scale - Both Logstash and Elastic Search are know for being able to handle lots of requests, but when needed both components are easily scaled.
Another benefit is the flexible plugin architecture, which makes the platform highly customizable - Lots of filters and parsers comes build into the product, but with more than 200 plugins already available on Github, the platform is even more so.
Alternative Solutions
Similar solutions does exist - Here are some solutions that Tech Chapter have also worked with:
How can Tech Chapter help you get started with Elastic Stack?
More of our Tech Chapter consultans have hands-on experience with Elastic Stack, from initial installation and configuration to the more nitty-gritty tasks of fine-tuning those Elastic Search shards etc.
Don’t hold back, Get in touch today if you would like to know more on how Tech Chapter can help you out with Elastic Stack.