Although this book is about Kibana, it doesn't make any sense if we are not aware of the complete Elastic Stack (ELK Stack), including Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash, and Beats. In this chapter, you are going to learn the basic concepts of the different software, installation, and their use cases. We cannot use Kibana to its full strength unless we know how to get proper data, filter it, and store it in a format that we can easily use in Kibana.

Elasticsearch is a search engine that is built on top of Apache Lucene, which is mainly used for storing schemaless data and searching it quickly. Logstash is a data pipeline that can practically take data from any source and send data to any source. We can also filter that data as per our requirements. Beats is a single-purpose software that is used to run on individual servers and send data to the Logstash server or directly to the Elasticsearch server. Finally, Kibana uses the data that's stored in Elasticsearch and creates beautiful dashboards using different types of visualization options, such as graphs, charts, histograms, word tags, and data tables. 

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics: