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

Using Metricbeat to monitor system and application metrics

Logs make up one aspect of data collection and visibility of a workload you need to monitor. Metrics are a great way to monitor and observe a workload as they represent the internal state of the component at any given point in time.

By correlating logs and metrics, an engineer or developer can quickly understand what a component is doing and how the internal state of the component is changing based on its activities in a given scenario. This is often a useful tool when troubleshooting and resolving issues related to the component in question.

In this section, we will look at collecting some metrics from the nginx web server as well as the host that the server runs on.

Follow the instructions to start collecting system and application metrics using Metricbeat:

  1. Ensure nginx is configured to expose an internal API to collect server metrics.
  2. Edit the /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default file and add the following...