Introducing Logstash, Beats, and Kibana
We have already seen how to install and configure Elasticsearch. So, we are not going to repeat it again. We will proceed with learning three more components of Elastic Stack: Logstash, Beats, and Kibana.
Working with Logstash
Logstash is one of the most popular tools for collecting, parsing, and enriching log-based data (usually, data which has a timestamp associated with it) from multiple sources such as log files, databases, Twitter, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudWatch, Apache Kafka, and many others. After processing and transforming the data through Logstash, you can send it to either Elasticsearch or many other data stores such as MongoDB, Amazon S3, and so on.
Logstash architecture
Logstash has plugin-based architecture. As shown in the following figure, there are three components of Logstash: Input, Filter, and Output:
There are hundreds of input, filter, and output ready-made open source plugins available to be used and the best part is if you do not...