Overview
The ELK Stack (now often called the Elastic Stack) is the most common solution for centralized logging. It allows you to collect logs from all your servers and applications, index them for fast searching, and create powerful visualizations.
Components
- Elasticsearch: A distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine.
- Logstash: A server-side data processing pipeline that ingests data from multiple sources, transforms it, and sends it to Elasticsearch.
- Kibana: A visualization and management tool for Elasticsearch, providing dashboards and a search interface.
- Beats: Lightweight data shippers (e.g., Filebeat, Metricbeat) that send data from the edge to Logstash or Elasticsearch.
Use Cases
- Centralized application logging.
- Security information and event management (SIEM).
- Operational intelligence and troubleshooting.