The Elastic Stack
The Elastic Stack (formerly known as ELK stack) is an open source software set for data search, analysis, and visualization in real time. The main stack products include:
- Elasticsearch - a distributed scalable engine with real-time search and analytics capabilities.
- Logstash - a flexible data processing pipeline. This tool will effectively collect, enrich, and transport (for example, into Elasticsearch) large volumes of logs, events, and unstructured data.
- Kibana - a data visualization tool that offers data interaction via powerful graphics.
- Beats - a platform for building lightweight, fast data shippers and collectors that simplify work with Logstash, Elasticsearch, and Kibana.
- Elastic Cloud provides fully hosted and managed solution that allows easy and quick Elasticsearch cluster deployment on AWS.
- Shield - a powerful tool that ensures Elastic Stack security using role-based access control, authentication, and encrypted communications.
- and more.
The Elastic Stack tools are developed to work very well together and complement each other. But they are also very efficient individually - there is no need to use the full stack if you need only Logstash’s log processing or Kibana’s visualization.
Kibana brings data to life
Kibana is a flexible open source analytics and visualization platform. It was designed to give users a better understanding of data indexed by an Elasticsearch cluster. Data can be imported into ElasticSearch from different sources: Logstash, ES-Hadoop, Beats, third-party technologies like Apache Flume, Fluentd, and many others.
Kibana comes with a simple, browser-based interface. Use Search Queries to filter logs, apply Time Filter to narrow the search results, customize Log View. Create visualizations, use them separately or arrange visualizations into groups that are called dashboards. Modify and view custom dynamic dashboards. Reload them at any time and share them with coworkers.
Kibana features
- User-friendly installation and startup. Kibana 4 even provides its own web server out-of-the-box.
- Intuitive web-interface.
- Fast sharing and embedding of the visualized data.
- Smooth integration with Elasticsearch.
- Visualization of big amount of data by displaying it using different visualization types ranging from Vertical bar and Pie charts to Tile maps (for displaying data on a map) and Data tables.
- Real-time summary and charting of streaming data.
- Easy export and combination of data with other data sets for prototyping of new analyses.
Kibana is a great tool if you want to interact with both unstructured and structured data indexed into Elasticsearch. You can easily perform powerful data analysis, group and visualize, slice and dice your data into varied charts, tables, and maps. To get more information visit Elastic/Kibana website.