Introduction
Although we all know about the term stack as a part of being in the IT Industry, sometimes we need to look at it when anyone asks about ELK. So what does ELK stand for? The term “ELK” is an acronym referring to three open-source projects. Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana, where the terms can be explained in brief as follows.
- Elasticsearch is an open-source, free Java-based, RESTful search engine designed, built, licensed, and distributed by the Apache software foundation. It can also perform search and analysis functions by using a standard RESTful JSON file and APIs.
- Logstash is a data processing pipeline that runs at the server-side that simultaneously ingests the data from multiple sources, transforms the data, and sends it to a “stash,” like Elasticsearch. It also provides structure to data like parsing unstructured logs, and data transmitting to ElasticSearch.
- Kibana lets the users visualize the data in the form of charts and vivid graphs and dashboards present in Elasticsearch. It is said that Elasticsearch is the next-gen evolution of the ELK stack.
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Evolution of ELK
It all started with Elasticsearch
The evolution of ELK has taken place from Elasticsearch, an open-source, RESTful, distributed, and JSON-based search engine. It is an easy to use, scalable, and flexible search engine. It also earned hyper-popularity among its users and a company formed around it, just for search.
Then, it grew with Logstash and Kibana
Users have started using Elasticsearch for logs and wanted to easily ingest and visualize them. Enter Kibana, the flexible visualization tool, and Logstash, the powerful ingest pipeline.
Eventually, the community expanded with numerous use cases
Whether it is to find the top N results in a text-based documents jungle, freely slice and dice metrics, analyze security events, or the worldwide community keeps pushing the boundaries with ELK.
Then, the journey has dropped a Beat on ELK
When one of the users said, “I want to tail a file,” and the company listened to it. In 2015, the company had introduced a family of single-purpose, lightweight data shippers into the ELK Stack equation, and they called them Beats.
So, where did it leave ELK?
It seems to be funny. Do we need to call it BELK? ELKB? Or BLEK? This is the primary question raised by many ones. The acronym alphabet soupification threat was real. The acronym really wasn’t for a stack so scalable.
Finally, enter the Elastic Stack
The similar open-source products users know and love, only better integrated, more comfortable to get started with, more powerful, and brimming with possibility.
As an end and as of now, the journey flow has entered into the Elastic Stack finally.
Why use ELK Stack?
In this data-driven world, databases must consistently handle the increasingly vast amounts of data. Typically, analytic processes are becoming a slow down as the amount of data a system handles continues to increase. ELK stack helps us to improve these analytic processes. Few of the overview of the benefits of using ELK stack includes,
- ELK stack is a total log-analysis platform for analyses, search, and visualization of log-generated data from different platforms/machines
- It can be pulled, analyzed, and visualized data securely, in real-time, from any source and format.
- The ELK stack can perform centralized logging that helps to identify any server and application-related issues across multiple servers and correlate the logs in a specific time frame.
- It is geared to handle big data to provide essential business insights
- It is simple to use, set up, and also user-friendly
- Elk is highly cost-effective as an open-source program.
Case Studies
Some of the case studies on the usage of the ElK stack have been mentioned below.
NetFlix
Netflix extensively depends on the ELK stack. The company uses the ELK stack to monitor and analyze the security log of customer service operations. It allows them to store, index, and search documents from more than fifteen clusters comprising almost 800 nodes.
The most popular and trusted social media marketing site, LinkedIn uses the ELK stack to monitor security and performance. The IT team has integrated ELK with Kafka to support its load in real-time. Their ELK operation includes more than 100 clusters across six different data centers.
Reasons to use the ELK (Elastic) Stack
Elastic Stack all the time meets the growing business needs with an integrated and efficient toolset designed to deliver actionable real-time insights from vast sets of search data. Its years of practical implementations and highly active community offer an unmatched combination of maturity and future-proof growth.
There are many scores of reasons to consider the Elastic Stack, and a few of them are listed below.
Enterprise Search
By empowering users to search anything from anywhere, Elastic Stack can unify the content platforms into a relevant and highly personalized experience. By doing so at the search level, Elastic Stack can empower users to search across the data silos, and enterprise systems, by offering them a comprehensive yet highly personalized search experience.
Observability
Elastic Stack brings real-time logs, metrics, and APM traces into a single consulted view easily. Companies can locate opportunities as they arise and challenges as they begin to develop, enabling for a profitable and quick response.
Scalability
The ELK stack deploys at scale irrespective of the company’s technical infrastructure. Private and public cloud implementations, containerized or a bare-metal, and SaaS solution, the Elastic Stack is built to work with any company systems and adapt as the company grows.
Security
As a part of the platform’s internal security, including field-level security on documents and index encryption, the SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) application collects all the security information across the enterprise. It provides richly detailed dashboards that allow for close scrutiny of security operations.
Conclusion
If we want to justify the question, “Why do we use ELK Stack?” It is a successive modern platform. We can also use it as a Stack, including its easy-to-learn log-analysis function, Globally. Even though the ELK stack suits well to handle big data for large corporations, it is still a valuable suite for startup companies running their smaller systems.
ScriptBees offer a tailored approach across every development phase of the ELK Stack by providing you the services that you require at a less cost compared to the current market.