ELK Stack

Similar to some of the technologies that we have covered in this book, an ELK stack really deserves a book by itself; in fact, there are books for each of the elements that make an ELK stack, these elements are:

• Elasticsearch is a powerful search server, which has been developed with modern workloads in mind

• Logstash sits between your data source and Elasticsearch services; it transforms your data in real time to a format, which Elasticsearch can understand.

• Kibana is in front of your Elasticsearch services and allows you to query your data in a feature-rich web-based dashboard.

There are a lot of moving parts with an ELK stack, so to simplify things, we will use a prebuilt stack for the purpose of testing; however, you probably don't want to use this stack in production.

Starting the stack

Let's launch a fresh vagrant host on which to run the ELK stack:

[russ@mac ~]$ cd ~/Documents/Projects/monitoring-docker/vagrant-centos/
[russ@mac ~]$ vagrant up
Bringing machine 'default' up with...