Now let's look at some of the popular monitoring solutions that can be used to build a custom microservice monitoring solution. It is inherent that these solutions do not come out of the box; however, they are definitely time tested by the open source community and can be easily integrated within .NET-based environments.
As we saw, one of the fundamental tools for monitoring is logging. For microservices, there will be a volume of logs generated that are astounding and sometimes not even comprehended by humans. The ELK stack (also referred to as the elastic stack) is the most popular log management platform. It is also a good candidate for microservice monitoring because of its ability to aggregate, analyze, visualize, and monitor. The ELK stack is a toolchain that includes three distinct tools, namely Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Let's visit them one by one to understand their role in the ELK stack.