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

Monitoring the uptime and availability of services using Heartbeat

An important part of running a web application is ensuring it is available and accessible to users. Various activities can result in an outage or degraded service levels for end users. While logs and metrics provide in-depth information about the workload, monitoring the service from the user's perspective is useful to ensure service standards.

Heartbeat can be set up to continuously monitor assets to ensure they are reachable and configured properly. We will leverage Heartbeat to monitor the Recipe Search Service web page, as well as the Elasticsearch cluster we're using to monitor the web server host.

Follow the instructions to set up and configure the Heartbeat agent:

  1. Install Heartbeat using the installation options we've already discussed.
  2. Set up the Heartbeat agent to load the monitor configuration.

Heartbeat uses the concept of monitors to perform uptime checks on a given...