Book Image

Getting Started with Elastic Stack 8.0

By : Asjad Athick
Book Image

Getting Started with Elastic Stack 8.0

By: Asjad Athick

Overview of this book

The Elastic Stack helps you work with massive volumes of data to power use cases in the search, observability, and security solution areas. This three-part book starts with an introduction to the Elastic Stack with high-level commentary on the solutions the stack can be leveraged for. The second section focuses on each core component, giving you a detailed understanding of the component and the role it plays. You’ll start by working with Elasticsearch to ingest, search, analyze, and store data for your use cases. Next, you’ll look at Logstash, Beats, and Elastic Agent as components that can collect, transform, and load data. Later chapters help you use Kibana as an interface to consume Elastic solutions and interact with data on Elasticsearch. The last section explores the three main use cases offered on top of the Elastic Stack. You’ll start with a full-text search and look at real-world outcomes powered by search capabilities. Furthermore, you’ll learn how the stack can be used to monitor and observe large and complex IT environments. Finally, you’ll understand how to detect, prevent, and respond to security threats across your environment. The book ends by highlighting architecture best practices for successful Elastic Stack deployments. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to implement the Elastic Stack and derive value from it.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Core Components
4
Section 2: Working with the Elastic Stack
12
Section 3: Building Solutions with the Elastic Stack

Getting up and running on Kibana

Collecting and ingesting data into your Elasticsearch cluster is only half the challenge when it comes to extracting insights and building useful outcomes from your datasets. Having access to fully featured and well-documented REST APIs on the Elasticsearch level is super useful, especially when your applications and systems programmatically consume responses from queries and aggregations, among other things. However, end users would much rather use an intuitive visual interface to build visualizations to understand trends in business data, diagnose bugs in their applications, and hunt for threats in their environment.

Kibana is the primary user interface when it comes to interacting with Elasticsearch clusters and, to some extent, components such as Logstash and Beats.

Given Kibana is primarily used to interact with data on Elasticsearch, an Elasticsearch cluster must be available for Kibana to run. The backing Elasticsearch cluster is used to...