ELK – Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana
Why use ELK?
The ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) is highly used because it fulfils a need in the log management and analytics space. Monitoring modern applications and the IT infrastructure they are deployed on require a log management and analytics solution that enables to overcome challenges in monitoring the highly distributed, dynamic and busy environments. The stack is a powerful platform that collects, processes and analyses data from multiple sources, stores that data in one centralized data store and can scale as the data grows.
Top benefits of Ashnik’s ELK offerings
Independent and unbiased insights for smarter decision making
Design and architecting skills to address your current and emerging needs
Deployment and integration expertise to simplify the complexities
Operational support so that you can be at ease
Automation to address a rapidly scaling landscape
Elasticsearch
Elasticsearch is a free and open, full-text search and analysis engine, based on the Apache Lucene search engine. It enables in indexing and storing the data. This NoSQL database used as the underlying engine to powers applications that completed search requirements. It has been adopted in search engine platforms for modern web and mobile applications. Apart from a quick search, the tool also offers complex analytics and many advanced features.
Advantages of Elasticsearch
- Stores schema-less data and creates a schema for data
- Manipulates your data record by record using Multi-document APIs
- Performs filtering and querying of data to derive insights
- Is based on Apache Lucene and provides RESTful API
- Provides horizontal scalability, reliability, and multi-tenant capabilities for real time use of indexing to make search faster
How to configure High available Elasticsearch?
Logstash
Logstash is a log aggregator that collects data from various input sources, executes different transformations and enhancements and then ships the data to various supported output destinations. It can unify data from disparate sources and normalize the data into your desired destinations. It also supports cleansing and democratizing your data for analytics and visualization of use cases.
Advantages of Logstash
- Enables centralized data processing
- Analyzes a large variety of structured/unstructured data and events
- Offers plugins to connect with various types of input sources and platforms
Kibana
Kibana is a visualization layer that works on top of Elasticsearch, providing users an interface for data querying and visualizing. The tool helps visualize Elasticsearch documents and enable developers get a quick insight into it. The Kibana dashboard offers various interactive diagrams, geospatial data, and graphs to visualize complex quires.
Advantages of Kibana
- Powerful front-end dashboard capable of visualizing indexed information from the elastic cluster
- Enables real-time search of indexed information
- Fully integrated with Elasticsearch
- Offers real-time analysis, charting, summarization, and debugging capabilities
- Provides instinctive and user-friendly interface
- Allows sharing of snapshots of the logs searched through
Beats
Beats are lightweight agents installed on edge hosts to collect different types of data for forwarding into the stack. Beats and Logstash together take care of data collection and processing.
Together, these components are commonly used for monitoring, troubleshooting and securing IT environments. There are more use cases for the ELK Stack such as business intelligence and web analytics.
ELK Stack Architecture
Why is Log Analysis becoming important?
Logs have always existed and so have the different tools available for analyzing them. But today’s complex architectures have evolved into microservices, containers and orchestration infrastructure deployed on the cloud, across clouds or in hybrid environments. This is where a centralized log management and analytics solutions such as the ELK Stack comes into the picture – allowing engineers, whether DevOps, IT Operations or SREs, to gain the visibility they need and ensure apps are available and performant at all times.
