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

Observing your environment

In the previous sections, we've discussed the need for taking a layered approach throughout your environment and business for a comprehensive observability function. It is worth mapping out your architecture and environment to identify the different layers you need to observe. This process often starts at the infrastructure level for most environments. Environments often include the following layers:

Figure 11.4 – Illustration of the different layers and technology stacks in an environment

Beats and Elastic Agent integrations can be leveraged to start collecting the data necessary for visibility. Elastic provides an integrations page to search for technologies or vendors in use, and the corresponding integration module to onboard the data source:

https://www.elastic.co/integrations

We've looked at configuring data collection and leveraging Elastic Agent integrations in Chapter 6, Collecting and Shipping Data...