Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana – The ELK stack

ELK Hunt

© Lead Image © welcomia, 123RF.com

© Lead Image © welcomia, 123RF.com

Article from Issue 185/2016
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A powerful search engine, a tool for processing and normalizing protocols, and another for visualizing the results – Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana form the ELK stack, which helps admins manage logfiles on high-volume systems.

Even a single, small LAMP server will produce a number of logfiles, and if you have a large array of servers, you can generally look forward to a volume of logfiles that is likely to exceed the capabilities of most built-in log management tools – if you want to analyze the data in your logs, that is. The different file formats output by the typical zoo of applications also add complexity.

The ELK stack, which is a combination of Elasticsearch [1], Logstash [2], and Kibana [3] addresses these difficulties. Elasticsearch is an extremely powerful search server that receives its data from Logstash, an application that extracts the data from server protocols, normalizes them, and dumps the results in an Elasticsearch index. Finally, the Kibana analytics and data visualization tool offers extremely flexible views of the information.

The lab environment consisted of several Debian Jessie servers, one running an ELK stack, as well as Filebeat [4], a service that acquires the local logs and sends them to Logstash. Filebeat can also collect logs from remote sources; we used it on another server that was already set up and upgraded as a central log host. The server also takes care of Syslog forwarding.

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