Posted on

Monitoring and the ELK Stack

Any application monitoring solution should maintain an open design, build upon proven technologies, be accessible, and require a low learning curve. The end goal is simple: provide teams with the ability to identify issues or unexpected behavior within minutes, if not seconds. The ELK Stack meets these expectations and more. In this Refcard, you'll cover the basic components of the ELK Stack, how it maps to a log analysis workflow, and step-by-step instructions for installation, configuration, and reporting.
Posted on

Hunting the ELK (Stack): Data Monitoring to Visualization

Experts in the field

Made up of Elastisearch, "a search and analytics engine," Logstash, "a server-side data processing pipeline that "ingests data from multiple sources simultaneously, transforms it, and then sends it to a 'stash'," (according to Elastic's official site) and Kibana, a robust visualization tool, the ELK stack has quickly become one of the premier tools available to developers for data processing, management, and visualization. 

Whether you're just starting out with any of the three technologies, or you're a seasoned veteran, we've compiled the best that our community has to offer for basic questions about getting started to complex tutorials for real-time data management. 

Posted on

Introduction to Elasticsearch and the ELK Stack, Part 1

SIn this article series, we are discussing Elasticsearch. In Part 1, we will start with an introduction of Elasticsearch and then will be have a brief discussion of the so-called ELK stack. In Part 2, we will then move to the architecture of Elasticsearch and what the heck nodes are, plus a look into clusters, shards, indexes, documents, replicatio,  and so on. So let's start.

Introduction to Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is open source analytics and full-text search engine. It’s often used for enabling search functionality for different applications. For example, a blog for which you want users to be able to search for various kinds of data. That could be blog posts, products, categories, etc. You can actually build complex search functionalities with Elasticsearch, like auto-completion, handling synonyms, adjusting relevance, and so on.

Posted on

ELK Stack Overview and Use Cases

Instead of writing about what exactly ELK is, let me state the need and use cases for it.

Log Aggregation and Efficient Searching

In a very naive scenario, you have one server and lots of log messages generated by your application and system which are crucial to look at once something goes wrong. Now there are basically two problems with it:

Posted on

Server Monitoring With Logz.io and the ELK Stack

In a previous article, we explained the importance of monitoring the performance of your servers. Keeping tabs on metrics such as CPU, memory, disk usage, uptime, network traffic, and swap usage will help you gauge the general health of your environment as well as provide the context you need to troubleshoot and solve production issues.

In the past, command line tools, such as top, htop, or nstat, might have been enough, but in today’s modern IT environments, a more centralized approach for monitoring must be implemented.

Posted on

Kafka Logging With the ELK Stack

Kafka and the ELK Stack — usually these two are part of the same architectural solution, Kafka acting as a buffer in front of Logstash to ensure resiliency. This article explores a different combination — using the ELK Stack to collect and analyze Kafka logs. 

More on the subject: