Elastic Stack- Overview For Beginners
This blog post is for newbies to Elastic Stack and I am sure you won’t be so after reading this! Let’s understand what Elastic Stack is and why do you need it.
Popularly known as ELK stack has been re-branded as Elastic Stack. The ELK stack is an amazing and powerful collection of three open source projects - Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Despite each one of these three technologies being a separate project, they have been built to work exceptionally well together .
In today’s data dominated world, irrespective of the size of the organization huge amount of data constantly flows into your systems on daily basis. As your data set grows larger, your analytics will slow up, resulting in sluggish insights. A considerable amount of this data is composed of the company’s web server logs. Logs are one of the most important and often-neglected sources of information. Each log file contains invaluable pieces of information which are mostly unstructured and makes no or little sense. Without a careful and detailed analysis of this log data, an organization can remain oblivious to both opportunities as well as threats surrounding it. Sigh!
So, the BIG question for your big data is: how can you maintain valuable business insights! Right? Don’t worry, here is where you need a log analysis tool.
ELK Stack or Elastic Stack is a complete end-to-end log analysis solution which helps in deep searching, analyzing and visualizing the log generated from different machines.
Yes, you read it right! Elastic stack reliably and securely takes data from any source, in any format, and search, analyze, and visualize it in real time. Using ELK Stack you can perform centralized logging which helps in identifying the problems with the web servers or applications. It lets you search through all the logs at a single place and identify the issues spanning through multiple servers by correlating their logs within a specific time frame.
The power of Elastic Stack lies in its powerful components- Elasticsearch- Logstash- Kibana- Beats- X Pack. To understand Elastic Stack better, you need to understand its components.
In my next blog post, I will be diving deeper into these components and will try to introduce Basic Elastic Stack Terms to get started with using it and getting most out of it. I recommend you to explore the Elastic Stack documentation for more clear understanding on https://www.elastic.co.
Feel free to give any suggestions and corrections in the comments below! :D
