Streaming Spring Boot Application Logs to ELK Stack — Part 1

What is ELK Stack ?

Logstash is a tool for managing logs. It supports virtually any type of log, including system logs, error logs, and custom application logs. It can receive logs from numerous sources, including syslog, messaging (for example, rabbitmq), and jmx, and it can output data in a variety of ways, including email, websockets, and to Elasticsearch.

Elasticsearch is a full-text, real-time search and analytics engine that stores the log data indexed by Logstash. It is built on the Apache Lucene search engine library and exposes data through REST and Java APIs. Elasticsearch is scalable and is built to be used by distributed systems.

Kibana is a web-based graphical interface for searching, analyzing, and visualizing log data stored in the Elasticsearch indices. It utilizes the REST interface of Elasticsearch to retrieve the data, and not only enables users to create customized dashboard views of their data, but also allows them to query and filter the data in an ad hoc manner.

The following image illustrates how the ELK Stack components are used to collect log data