What is ELK Stack?

ELK Stack is a stack with three different open source software—Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Elasticsearch is a search engine that is developed on top of Apache Lucene. Logstash is basically used for data pipelining where we can get data from any data source as an input, transform it if required, and send it to any destination as an output. In general, we use Logstash to push the data into Elasticsearch. Kibana is a dashboard or visualization tool, which can be configured with Elasticsearch to generate charts, graphs, and dashboards using our data:

We can use ELK Stack for different use cases, the most common being log analysis. Other than that, we can use it for business intelligence, application security and compliance, web analytics, fraud management, and so on.

In the following subsections, we are going to be looking at ELK Stack's components.