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

Collecting logs using Filebeat

If you have successfully set up nginx to serve the Recipe Search Service web page, you will have noticed some access and error logs being generated for every request served by the web server. The logs can often contain useful insights into how the web server is being used, the distribution of requests being made, and where requests originate from.

Collecting these logs using Filebeat is easy. Follow the instructions to set up the Filebeat agent to collect the logs and ship them to your Elasticsearch deployment for analysis:

  1. Install Filebeat on the web server host. Detailed installation options for installing Elastic Stack components are provided in Chapter 2, Installing and Running the Elastic Stack.
  2. The Filebeat agent can be configured from the filebeat.yml file located in the /etc/filebeat/ directory on Linux installations or in the config/ directory on tar archives. Edit the file as shown in the reference file, Chapter6/filebeat/filebeat...