Preface

Elasticsearch is one of the most popular tools for distributed open source search and analytics. This book will help you in understanding everything about the new features of Elasticsearch, and how to use them efficiently for searching, aggregating, and indexing data with speed and accuracy, while also helping you understand how you can use them to build your own search applications with ease. You will also acquire a basic understanding of how to build and deploy effective search and analytics solutions using Elasticsearch.

Starting with an introduction to the Elastic Stack, this book will help you quickly get up to speed with using Elasticsearch. Next, you'll learn how to deploy and manage Elasticsearch clusters, as well as how to use your deployment to develop powerful search and analytics solutions. As you progress, you'll also discover how to install, configure, manage, and secure Elasticsearch clusters, in addition to understanding how to troubleshoot any issues you may encounter along the way. Finally, the book helps you explore the inner workings of Elasticsearch and gain insights into queries, analyzers, mappings, and aggregations as you learn to work with search results.

Who this book is for

This book is for software developers, engineers, data architects, system administrators, or anyone who wants to get up and running with Elasticsearch 7.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Elastic Stack, will give you a brief history and background on Elasticsearch. We will also get introduced to log analysis and will cover some of the core components of the Elastic Stack architecture.

Chapter 2, Installing Elasticsearch, will cover the installation process of Elasticsearch in different environments. We will also look into installation using the Debian and rpm packages, followed by installation on Windows using the MSI installer of Elasticsearch.

Chapter 3, Many as One – the Distributed Model, will cover how to interact with Elasticsearch using REST calls to call different operations. We will also look at how we can handle multiple indices, followed by looking at some of the common options for the API response. We will also learn how to create, delete, and retrieve indices.

Chapter 4, Prepping Your Data – Text Analysis and Mapping, will walk through the details of how full text is analyzed and indexed in Elasticsearch, followed by looking into some of the various analyzers and filters and how they can be configured. We will also learn how Elasticsearch mappings are used for defining documents and fields and storing and indexing them, including how to define multi-fields and custom analyzers.

Chapter 5, Let's Do a Search!, will go into further detail regarding data searches, where we will cover URI search and body search. We will also cover some query examples using term, from/size, sort, and source filtering. Following that, we will also cover highlighting, rescoring, search type, and named queries.

Chapter 6, Performance Tuning, will cover data sparsity and how to improve the performance of Elasticsearch. We will also cover how to adjust the search speed by means of allocating memory to the filesystem cache, faster hardware, document modeling, pre-index data, avoiding replicas, and so on.

Chapter 7, Aggregating Datasets, will cover how to aggregate datasets and will explain the different types of aggregations that Elasticsearch supports.

Chapter 8, Best Practices, will cover the best practices we can follow in order to manage an Elasticsearch cluster.

To get the most out of this book

No prior experience with the Elastic Stack is required. The steps for installing and running Elasticsearch are covered in the book.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

1. Log in or register at www.packt.com.
2. Select the Support tab.
3. Click on Code Downloads.
4. Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

• WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
• Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
• 7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Elasticsearch-7-Quick-Start-Guide. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9781789803327_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Let's take the example of kibana_sample_data_flight data to understand how we can prettify the results using the pretty keyword."

A block of code is set as follows:

PUT index_name
{
    "settings": {
        "number_of_shards": 1
    },
    "mappings": {
        "_doc": {
            "properties": {
                "field_number_1": {
                    "type": "text"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

curl -L -O https://artifacts.elastic.co/downloads/elasticsearch/elasticsearch-7.1.1-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "A manual uninstall must be performed through Add or remove programs."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

Get in touch

Feedback from our readers is always welcome.

General feedback: If you have questions about any aspect of this book, mention the book title in the subject of your message and email us at [e-mail].

Errata: Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you have found a mistake in this book, we would be grateful if you would report this to us. Please visit www.packtpub.com/support/errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details.

Piracy: If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the internet, we would be grateful if you would provide us with the location address or website name. Please contact us at [e-mail] with a link to the material.

If you are interested in becoming an author: If there is a topic that you have expertise in, and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, please visit authors.packtpub.com.

Reviews

Please leave a review. Once you have read and used this book, why not leave a review on the site that you purchased it from? Potential readers can then see and use your unbiased opinion to make purchase decisions, we at Packt can understand what you think about our products, and our authors can see your feedback on their book. Thank you!

For more information about Packt, please visit packt.com.