Book Image

Learning Elastic Stack 7.0 - Second Edition

By : Pranav Shukla, Sharath Kumar M N
Book Image

Learning Elastic Stack 7.0 - Second Edition

By: Pranav Shukla, Sharath Kumar M N

Overview of this book

The Elastic Stack is a powerful combination of tools that help in performing distributed search, analytics, logging, and visualization of data. Elastic Stack 7.0 encompasses new features and capabilities that will enable you to find unique insights into analytics using these techniques. This book will give you a fundamental understanding of what the stack is all about, and guide you in using it efficiently to build powerful real-time data processing applications. The first few sections of the book will help you understand how to set up the stack by installing tools and exploring their basic configurations. You’ll then get up to speed with using Elasticsearch for distributed search and analytics, Logstash for logging, and Kibana for data visualization. As you work through the book, you will discover the technique of creating custom plugins using Kibana and Beats. This is followed by coverage of the Elastic X-Pack, a useful extension for effective security and monitoring. You’ll also find helpful tips on how to use Elastic Cloud and deploy Elastic Stack in production environments. By the end of this book, you’ll be well-versed with fundamental Elastic Stack functionalities and the role of each component in the stack to solve different data processing problems.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Introduction to Elastic Stack and Elasticsearch
4
Section 2: Analytics and Visualizing Data
10
Section 3: Elastic Stack Extensions
12
Section 4: Production and Server Infrastructure

Alerting

The Kibana UI provides beautiful visualizations that help with analyzing and detecting anomalies in data in real time. However, as an administrator or an analyst, it wouldn't be possible to sit in front of dashboards for hours to detect anomalies and take action. It would be nice if the administrator gets notified when, for example, the following events occur:

  • There is an outage in one of the servers being monitored
  • An Elasticsearch Cluster turns red/yellow due to some nodes leaving the cluster
  • Disk space/CPU utilization crosses a specific threshold
  • There is an intrusion in the network
  • There are errors reported in the logs

This is where the X-Pack Alerting component comes to the rescue. The X-Pack Alerting component, named Watcher, provides the ability to automatically watch for changes/anomalies in data stored on Elasticsearch and take the required action. X-Pack...