The Elastic Common Schema
In the previous chapters, most notably in Chapter 7, Using Kibana to Explore and Visualize Data, we discussed that the Elastic Common Schema (ECS) is a data model, developed by Elastic and their community, to describe common fields that are used when storing data in Elasticsearch. ECS defines specific field names, organizations, and data types for each field that is stored in Elasticsearch. While ECS is an open source model and is frequently contributed to by the Elastic community, it is maintained by Elastic.
Later, we'll see why ECS is strongly encouraged but not mandatory for storing data in Elasticsearch. When data cannot be stored in ECS, data providers can use general ECS guidelines (Elastic, https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/ecs/current/ecs-guidelines.html) to name and structure custom fields. This helps uniformly structure fields that are not in ECS.
While ECS is a data model, it is also an ideology that data should be stored uniformly so that...