Not all statuses of our Docker hosts and containers are readily available to be queried with our monitoring solution in Prometheus. Some events and metrics are only available as raw lines of text in log files. We need to transform these raw and unstructured logs to meaningful metrics. Similar to raw metrics, we can later ask higher-level questions about what is happening in our Docker-based application using analytics.
The ELK stack is a popular combination suite from Elastic that addresses these problems. Each letter in the acronym represents each of its components. The following list contains descriptions of each of them:
- Elasticsearch: Elasticsearch is a distributed search engine that is highly scalable. Its sharding capabilities allow us to grow and scale our log storage as we continue to receive more and more logs from our Docker containers...