Chapter 1, Introduction to ELK Stack, introduces ELK Stack, and what problems it solves for you. It explains the role of each component in the stack, and also gets you up and running with ELK Stack and with installations of all its components—Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana.

Chapter 2, Building Your First Data Pipeline with ELK, helps you build a basic ELK Stack pipeline using a CSV formatted input, and explores the basic configurations to get your ELK Stack up and running to analyze data quickly.

Chapter 3, Collect, Parse, and Transform Data with Logstash, covers the key features of Logstash, and explains how Logstash helps integrate with a variety of input and output sources. This chapter also aims to explain various Logstash input, filter, and output plugins, which help collect, parse, transform, and ship data using Logstash.

Chapter 4, Creating Custom Logstash Plugins, explains how we can create our own custom Logstash plugins catering to our various needs that are not satisfied using the already available plugins. It explains the lifecycle of a logstash plugin and how various types of input, filter, and output plugins can be developed and published.

Chapter 5, Why Do We Need Elasticsearch in ELK?, explains the role of Elasticsearch in ELK Stack, and explains the key features and basics of Elasticsearch, such as index, documents, shards, clusters, and so on. It also covers various indexing and searching APIs and Query DSLs available in Elasticsearch.

Chapter 6, Finding Insights with Kibana, explains how to use Kibana to search, view, and interact in real time with data that is stored in the Elasticsearch indices. It explores the various search options that are available, and how we can use the Discover page of the Kibana interface.

Chapter 7, Kibana – Visualization and Dashboard, explains in detail about the various visualizations and dashboards that are available in Kibana with various examples. It also explains the Settings page, which helps configure the index patterns, scripted fields, and so on.

Chapter 8, Putting It All Together, shows the combination of all three components to build a fully-fledged data pipeline using ELK Stack, mentioning the role of each of the components as explained in previous chapters.

Chapter 9, ELK Stack in Production, explains some of the important points to keep in mind while using ELK Stack in production. It also explains the various use cases, and case studies that make use of ELK Stack in various use cases across the industry.

Chapter 10, Expanding Horizons with ELK, explains various tools, which combined with ELK, enhances the capabilities of the stack.

This book is for anyone who wants to analyze data using low-cost options. No prior knowledge of ELK Stack or its components is expected, although familiarity with NoSQL databases and some programming knowledge will be helpful.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The preceding command will install the rabbitmq input plugin to the Logstash installation."

A block of code is set as follows:

filter {
drop {
}
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$bin/plugin install logstash-input-rabbitmq

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen."

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