Elastic Stack

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About

You can use the Elastic Stack without paying since the projects are opensource, but Elastic (company) offers plugins to make easier to setup everything, and these plugins are paid.

ELK Stack

Elasticsearch

Search engine and analytics.

It can do super fast searches over the data stored (Document Database, like json).

It has a Rest API to access the data.

It works in a distributed way with shards that have data redundancy, allowing it to be scalable.

Logstash

Real time data collector engine.

It is a data processor that runs through pipelines that can receive, transform and send data simultaneously. (Sends to Elasticsearch)

Kibana

Visual and data exploration tool.

Allows users to see the Elasticsearch data in various perpectives. (Dashboard tool)

ELK Stack vs Elastic Stack

Elastic Stack now uses Beats along side of Logstash to collect data.

Since Logstash is a lot harder to work with, it is not been used anymore to collect the data.

Beats

Beats can get logs, metrics, network data, audit data, uptime monitoring, etc, where each Beat is responsible for one of them.

Can easily integrate with Elasticsearch or Logstash and it is much easier to work with, expecially in the Cloud.

You can also create your own Beat.