Preface

A core aspect of working in any IT environment is the ability to make sense of and use large amounts of data. Every single component in your environment generates data about its state, warnings or errors that were encountered, and vital health and diagnostic information about the component. The ability to collect, analyze, correlate, and visualize this data is key to the operational resiliency as well as security of your organization.

The Elastic Stack has deep roots in the world of search. Elasticsearch is a powerful and ultra-scalable search engine and data store that gives users the ability to ingest and search across massive volumes of data. The flexibility of Elasticsearch allows users to build simple experiences to find what they are looking for in large repositories of data.

The Elastic Stack is a collection of technologies that can collect data from any source system, transform the data to make it useful, and give users the ability to understand and derive insights from the data to enable a range of use cases. Today, the Elastic Stack consists of Beats, Logstash, and Elastic Agent as collection and transformation tools; Elasticsearch as a search and analytics engine; and Kibana as a tool to build solutions around your data. The Elastic Stack has become a de facto standard when it comes to collecting and analyzing data, used widely in open source as well as enterprise and commercial projects.

The main goal of this book is to simplify and optimize your experience as you get started with this technology. The flexibility of the Elastic Stack means there is more than one way to solve a given problem. The nature of the individual core components also means that the guides and reference materials available focus on technical capability and not the solutions or outcomes that can be built.

This book aims to give you a robust introduction and understanding of the core components and how they work together to solve problems in the realms of search, observability, and security. It also focuses on the most up-to-date best practices and approaches to implementing your solution using the stack.

Use this book to give yourself a head start on your Elastic Stack projects. You will understand the capabilities of the stack and build your solutions to evolve and grow alongside your environment, as well as using the insights in your data to best serve your users while delivering value to your organization.