Manually digging through log files to gain insights or to detect anomalies can be very slow and time-consuming. To solve this issue, we're going to run through a quick example using the Elastic Stack (previously referred to as the Elasticsearch Logstash Kibana (ELK) stack. Elasticsearch is a high-speed search engine which offers real-time indexing and searching. Data is stored as schema-less JSON documents and has an easy-to-use API for access.
To complement this, there's also Logstash and Kibana. Logstash is a tool that allows for the collection of logs, parses the data on the fly, and then pushes it to a storage backend such as Elasticsearch. The original creator of Logstash (Jordan Sissel) wrote it to parse web server log files such as those produced by NGINX, so it's well suited to the task.
Kibana is then the final part of the puzzle...