Book Image

Mastering Elastic Stack

By : Ravi Kumar Gupta, Yuvraj Gupta
Book Image

Mastering Elastic Stack

By: Ravi Kumar Gupta, Yuvraj Gupta

Overview of this book

Even structured data is useless if it can’t help you to take strategic decisions and improve existing system. If you love to play with data, or your job requires you to process custom log formats, design a scalable analysis system, and manage logs to do real-time data analysis, this book is your one-stop solution. By combining the massively popular Elasticsearch, Logstash, Beats, and Kibana, elastic.co has advanced the end-to-end stack that delivers actionable insights in real time from almost any type of structured or unstructured data source. If your job requires you to process custom log formats, design a scalable analysis system, explore a variety of data, and manage logs, this book is your one-stop solution. You will learn how to create real-time dashboards and how to manage the life cycle of logs in detail through real-life scenarios. This book brushes up your basic knowledge on implementing the Elastic Stack and then dives deeper into complex and advanced implementations of the Elastic Stack. We’ll help you to solve data analytics challenges using the Elastic Stack and provide practical steps on centralized logging and real-time analytics with the Elastic Stack in production. You will get to grip with advanced techniques for log analysis and visualization. Newly announced features such as Beats and X-Pack are also covered in detail with examples. Toward the end, you will see how to use the Elastic stack for real-world case studies and we’ll show you some best practices and troubleshooting techniques for the Elastic Stack.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Elastic Stack
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Exploring Input Plugins


An input plugin is used to get data from a source or multiple sources and to feed data into Logstash. It acts as the first section, which is required in the Logstash configuration file. Some of the input plugins are described in the following sections.

stdin

The stdin is a fairly simple plugin, which reads the data from a standard input. It reads the data we enter in the console, which then acts as an input to Logstash. This is mostly used to validate whether the installation of Logstash is done properly and whether we are able to access Logstash.

The basic configuration for stdin is as follows:

stdin { 
} 

In this plugin, no additional settings are mandatory. If we use the preceding configuration, whatever we write in the console will be taken as input, without any additional parameters.

The additional configuration settings are as follows:

  • add_field: This is used to add a field to the incoming data.

  • codec: This is used to decode the incoming data and to interpret...