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

Preparing data for analysis

We will consider an example of network traffic data generated from Wi-Fi routers. Throughout this chapter, we will analyze the data from this example. It is important to understand what the records in the underlying system look like, and what they represent.

We will cover the following topics while we prepare and load the data into the local Elasticsearch instance:

  • Understanding the structure of the data
  • Loading the data using Logstash

Understanding the structure of the data

The following diagram depicts the design of the system, in order to help you gain a better understanding of the problem and the structure of the data that's collected:

Fig 4.1: Network traffic and bandwidth usage data...