Preface

Elastic Stack is a powerful combination of tools for the distributed search, analytics, logging, and visualization of data from medium to massive data sets. The newly released Elastic Stack 6.0 brings new features and capabilities that empower users to find unique, actionable insights through these techniques. This book will give you a fundamental understanding of what the stack is all about, and how to use it efficiently to build powerful real-time data processing applications.
After a quick overview of the newly introduced features in Elastic Stack 6.0, you'll learn how to set up the stack by installing the tools, and see their basic configurations. Then the book shows you how to use Elasticsearch for distributed searching and analytics, along with Logstash for logging, and Kibana for data visualization. It also demonstrates the creation of custom plugins using Kibana and Beats. You'll find out about Elastic X-Pack, a useful extension for effective security and monitoring. We also provide useful tips on how to use the Elastic Cloud and deploy Elastic Stack in production environments.