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

Responding to changing data with Watcher

From the previous sections, we know how to search for data, aggregate it for analytics, and how to transform documents so that they comply with the desired schema. These capabilities power user-driven data exploration and visualization (using frontend tools such as Kibana). The same capabilities can also be used to provide automated alerting and response actions for your incoming data.

Watcher is a flexible tool that can be used to solve various alerting use cases. The following list describes some of the common alerting use cases:

  • Alert on a singular event with a particular value:

a. Alert when event.severity: critical

b. Alert when disk_free < 1GB

  • Alert if event count matching a filter exceeds a threshold:

a. Alert if 10 or more events with event.severity: critical have occurred in the last 5 mins.

b. Alert if 5 or more login_failed events per username have occurred in the last 5 mins.

  • Alert...