Chapter 1: Introduction to the Elastic Stack

Welcome to Getting Started with Elastic Stack 8.0. The Elastic Stack has exploded in popularity over the last couple of years, becoming the de facto standard for centralized logging and "big data"-related use cases. The stack is leveraged by organizations, both big and small, across the world to solve a range of data-related problems. Hunting for adversaries in your network, looking for fraudulent transactions, real-time monitoring and alerting in systems, and searching for relevant products in catalogs are some of the real-world applications of the Elastic Stack.

The Elastic Stack is a bundle of multiple core products that integrate with each other. We will look at each product briefly in this chapter, and then dive into each one in later chapters in this book. The Elastic Stack attracts a great deal of interest from developers and architects that are working for organizations of all sizes. This book aims to serve as the go-to guide for those looking to get started with the best practices when it comes to building real-world search, security, and observability platforms using this technology.

In this chapter, you will learn a little bit about each component that makes up the Elastic Stack, and how they can be leveraged for your use cases. Those of you who are beginners or intermediary learners of this subject will benefit from this content to gain useful context for Chapter 3, Indexing and Searching for Data, to Chapter 13, Architecting Workloads on the Elastic Stack, of this book.

Specifically, we will cover the following topics:

• An overview of the Elastic Stack
• An introduction to Elasticsearch
• Visualizing and interacting with data on Kibana
• Ingesting various data sources using Logstash and Beats
• End-to-end solutions on the Elastic Stack