Summary

This chapter gave you an overview of Elasticsearch and why it's important to proactively monitor a cluster. To summarize the points from the chapter:

• Elasticsearch is an open source scalable, fast, and fault-tolerant search engine
• Elasticsearch is built on top of Apache Lucene, the same library that powers Apache Solr
• Monitoring tools will help us get a better understanding of our cluster and will let us know when problems arise
• As helpful as monitoring tools are, it's up to us to actually diagnose and fix cluster issues

In the next chapter, we'll cover how to get a simple Elasticsearch cluster running and loaded with data, and how to install several monitoring tools.