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

Technical requirements

To see data collection methodologies in action, this chapter will use a web server configured to serve a static HTML web page. Follow these instructions to set up and configure this component before reading ahead:

  1. Provision and configure a virtual machine (locally or on a cloud service) with at least 2 vCPUs and 4 GB memory. This chapter will use a machine running Ubuntu 16.04, but you can choose any compatible Linux operating system of your choice, as described in Chapter 2, Installing and Running the Elastic Stack.
  2. We will use nginx to serve our static web page. Nginx is an open source web server and reverse proxy application. With the appropriate privileges (using sudo where necessary on your OS), run the following commands to install nginx:
    sudo apt-get update
    sudo apt-get install nginx
  3. Confirm nginx is installed by running this:
    nginx -v
  4. The code repository for this chapter contains a static website in Chapter6/html-webpage. The following...