In the past few years, implementations of Elastic Stack have been increasing very rapidly. In this section, we will consider a few case studies to understand how Elastic Stack has helped this development.
Salesforce developed a new plugin named ELF (Event Log Files) to collect Salesforce logged data to, enable auditing of user activities. The purpose was to analyze the data to understand user behavior and trends in Salesforce.
The plugin is available on GitHub at https://github.com/developerforce/elf_elk_docker.
ELF is an abbreviation for Event Log Files. This plugin simplifies the Stack configuration and allows to download Event Log Files to get indexed and finally make sense of the data by visualizing it using Kibana. This implementation utilizes Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana.
There is not just one use case that Elastic Stack helped CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research), but five. At CERN, Elastic Stack is used for the following:
Messaging
Data monitoring
Cloud benchmarking
Infrastructure monitoring
Job monitoring
Multiple Kibana dashboards are used by CERN for a number of visualizations.
Green Man Gaming is an online gaming platform where game providers publish their games. The website wanted to make a difference by proving better gameplay. They started using Elastic Stack to carry out log analysis, search, and analysis of gameplay data.
They began with setting up Kibana dashboards to gain insights about the counts of gamers, by the country and currency used by gamers. This helped them to understand and streamline support and help in order to provide an improved response.
Apart from these case studies, Elastic Stack is used by a number of other companies to gain insights into the data they own. Sometimes, not all of the components are used; that is, not all of the times a Beat would be used and Logstash would be configured. Sometimes, only an Elasticsearch and Kibana combination is used.
If we look at the users within the organization, all of the titles who are expected to do big data analysis, business intelligence, data visualizations, log analysis, and so on, can utilize Elastic Stack for their technical forte, for example data scientists, devops, and so on.