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

How Beats differ from Logstash


From what we have understood about Beats, it looks fairly similar to Logstash, wherein we have input plugins that are used to parse the data. So, how does Beats differ? Beats are data shippers shipping data from a variety of inputs such as files, data streams, or logs whereas Logstash is a data parser. Though Logstash can ship data, it's not its primary usage. In a nutshell, Beats and Logstash are similar in functionality, but there are glaring differences between them both in terms of how they are developed and the underlying technology used.

Let's look at the differences between them:

  • Logstash consumes a lot of memory and requires a higher amount of resources, whereas Beats requires fewer resources and consumes low memory.

  • Logstash is heavy to install on all the systems from which you want to collect the logs, whereas Beats are lightweight data shippers that will ship your data from multiple systems.

  • If you are collecting logs from multiple systems, then you...