To get the most out of this book

While this book starts from the ground up in terms of instructions on installation and configuration of the Elastic Stack and the ML feature, it is helpful to have prior experience of setting up and using the Elastic Stack or a similar big data analysis platform.

While the majority of product installation and utilization can be managed by means of a personal computer/laptop (that meets the minimum specifications), the reader can also register for a free trial setup on https://cloud.elastic.co/login?redirectTo=%2Fdeployments if that is logistically easier.

No prior experience of IT and/or security operations is necessary to get the most out of this book, but many topics and concepts are written with a view to addressing the plight of an operations analyst.

Many examples shown in this book use demo data sets that are available on the GitHub repository for this book. However, some examples (in Chapter 3, Event Change Detection and Chapter 5, Security Analytics with Elastic Machine Learning for example) use datasets that could not be distributed publicly. In those cases, you can either replicate the examples using similar kinds of data sets (that is, web access logs) or just follow along conceptually.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packt.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

1. Log in or register at www.packt.com.
2. Select the SUPPORT tab.
3. Click on Code Downloads & Errata.
4. Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

• WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
• Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
• 7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Machine-Learning-with-the-Elastic-Stack. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9781788477543_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "The log section will print a message to an output file, which by default is the Elasticsearch log file."

A block of code is set as follows:

GET _cat/indices/metricbeat*

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

cd kibana-x.y.z-darwin-x86_64/

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "In the Management section of Kibana, click on the Index Patterns link."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.