Searching and grouping logs with managed Elasticsearch

Many people associate Elasticsearch with ELK; however, the two have differences. ELK stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. In this configuration, Elasticsearch serves as the storage, Logstash serves as the log parser, and Kibana serves as the visualization frontend of the system where users interact with the system:

Figure 17.8 – A comparison of the ELK stack versus Amazon's managed Elasticsearch service

With Amazon's managed Elasticsearch service, there is no Logstash installed by default; however, there are other options to get the logs that you generate into your Elasticsearch cluster.

Use cases for managed Elasticsearch

There are several use cases for using the managed Elasticsearch product from AWS. Let's examine them next.

Store and search logs for application monitoring

You can stream logs that have been placed into AWS CloudWatch Logs into Amazon&apos...