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

Instrumenting your application performance

Logs and metrics provide a good level of visibility into the different components in your environment. Instrumenting application performance, especially for the applications you develop and support, is a great way to bring more data and context in your journey toward end-to-end observability. APM works by collecting traces from when your code executes in real time. This data can be correlated with logs and metrics from your application to help engineers answer a wide range of questions when diagnosing issues.

Traces are collected by running an APM agent as part of your application code. Different APM agents are available for supported languages and frameworks your application is written in. All supported languages and corresponding frameworks can be found in the reference guide:

https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/apm/agent/index.html

Traces collected from your application are sent to an APM server for processing and enrichment, before...