Elastic Stack¶

Overview¶

The Elastic Stack, formerly known as ELK, is a software suite composed of the following core components:

the Elasticsearch search engine and indexer;
the Logstash client;
the Kibana web dashboard.

A typical installation might also feature:

the X-Pack security, machine learning and monitoring plugin collection;
several Beats lightweight data shippers.

Documentation¶

Setup¶

Security¶

The X-Pack plugin comes with a subscription plan and a 30-day trial license:

Subscriptions
License expiration
After X-Pack license expiration - Elastic forum

Once the license has expired, a number of features become unavailable, among which is user management (authentication, authorization).

This limitation can be circumvented by serving the Elastic Stack services behind a reverse HTTP proxy, using Basic Authentication features to manage user authentication and provide simple authorization:

Playing HTTP Tricks with Nginx

Cluster management¶

Community¶

Real-world use cases¶

Elastic highlights¶

Community resources¶

What are use cases of Elasticsearch? - Quora
Engineering Uber Predictions in Real Time with ELK - Uber Engineering Blog
How to use Elasticsearch for Natural Language Processing and Text Mining - Dataconomy

Tutorials and examples¶

ELK Hello World Example¶

Apache HTTPD 2.4 logs¶

Kibana visualizations¶

Creating the perfect Kibana dashboard

Python bindings¶

elasticsearch-py low-level API
elasticsearch-dsl high-level Domain-Specific Language (DSL)
Having fun: Python and Elasticsearch, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3