Chapter 1. Elastic Stack Overview
It's as easy to read a log file of a few MBs or hundreds as it is to keep data of this size in databases or files and still get sense out of it. But then a day comes when this data takes up terabytes, petabytes and grows even faster in future. As data demand pushes, normal text editors or word processing tools would refuse to cope up and would not be able to open such a large dataset. There would be a need to analyze the raw data which can be used to discover insights. You start to find something for huge log management, or something that can index the data properly and make sense out of it. If you Google this, you will stumble upon ELK Stack. Elasticsearch manages your data, Logstash reads the data from different sources, and Kibana makes a fine visualization of it.
Recently, ELK Stack has evolved as Elastic Stack. We will get to know more about it in this chapter, along with setting it up. The following are the points that will be covered in this chapter:
- Introduction to ELK Stack
- The birth of Elastic Stack
- Who uses the Stack
- Stack competitors
- Setting up Elastic Stack
- X-Pack