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 Elastic Team Beats


As we already covered the different types of beats provided by the Elastic Team, in this section, we will explore those beats and understand their features, learn how to set them up, and how to configure the beats with the various configuration options as provided. This section will provide you with all the necessary information you will need for understanding beats in detail.

Understanding Filebeat

As discussed, Filebeat is an open source log shipping agent that has been inspired by the Logstash-forwarder project, and it's based on the Logstash-forwarder source code. Filebeat is used for monitoring logs (files or directories) and forwards those logs to either Logstash, for further processing, or to Elasticsearch, for data indexing.

Let's understand how Filebeat works with the help of its architecture, as displayed below:

Link: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/filebeat/5.1/filebeat-overview.html

In the preceding image, there are a lot of new terms to understand...