Preface

A core aspect of working in any IT environment is the ability to make sense of and use large amounts of data. Every single component in your environment generates data about its state, warnings or errors that were encountered, and vital health and diagnostic information about the component. The ability to collect, analyze, correlate, and visualize this data is key to the operational resiliency as well as security of your organization.

The Elastic Stack has deep roots in the world of search. Elasticsearch is a powerful and ultra-scalable search engine and data store that gives users the ability to ingest and search across massive volumes of data. The flexibility of Elasticsearch allows users to build simple experiences to find what they are looking for in large repositories of data.

The Elastic Stack is a collection of technologies that can collect data from any source system, transform the data to make it useful, and give users the ability to understand and derive insights from the data to enable a range of use cases. Today, the Elastic Stack consists of Beats, Logstash, and Elastic Agent as collection and transformation tools; Elasticsearch as a search and analytics engine; and Kibana as a tool to build solutions around your data. The Elastic Stack has become a de facto standard when it comes to collecting and analyzing data, used widely in open source as well as enterprise and commercial projects.

The main goal of this book is to simplify and optimize your experience as you get started with this technology. The flexibility of the Elastic Stack means there is more than one way to solve a given problem. The nature of the individual core components also means that the guides and reference materials available focus on technical capability and not the solutions or outcomes that can be built.

This book aims to give you a robust introduction and understanding of the core components and how they work together to solve problems in the realms of search, observability, and security. It also focuses on the most up-to-date best practices and approaches to implementing your solution using the stack.

Use this book to give yourself a head start on your Elastic Stack projects. You will understand the capabilities of the stack and build your solutions to evolve and grow alongside your environment, as well as using the insights in your data to best serve your users while delivering value to your organization.

Who this book is for

This book is designed for those with little to no experience with the Elastic Stack. It does, however, expect you to have the curiosity to learn and explore new technologies and be comfortable with basic Linux and system administration and simple scripting. You are also encouraged to supplement the content in this book with further online research where appropriate for best outcomes.

Developers, engineers, and analysts can use this book to learn how use cases and solutions can be implemented to solve their data problems.

Solution architects and tech leads can understand how the components work at a high level and where the capability may fit at a high level in their environment.

The book makes it easy to wrap your head around the various core technologies in the Elastic Stack with structured content, story-based explanations, and hands-on exercises to expedite your learning.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to the Elastic Stack, gives you an overview of the core components of the stack and the solutions they can enable.

Chapter 2, Installing and Running the Elastic Stack, shows you how the core components can be installed, orchestrated, and run.

Chapter 3, Indexing and Searching for Data, explores Elasticsearch fundamentals for indexing and full-text search.

Chapter 4, Leveraging Insights and Managing Data on Elasticsearch, dives deeper into Elasticsearch, exploring aggregations, the data life cycle, and alerting.

Chapter 5, Running Machine Learning Jobs on Elasticsearch, looks at how supervised and unsupervised machine learning jobs can be configured to run on your data.

Chapter 6, Collecting and Shipping Data with Beats, introduces you to commonly used Beats agents and the different types of data sources they can collect on the stack.

Chapter 7, Using Logstash to Extract, Transform, and Load Data, explores the use of Logstash to build ETL pipelines for your data.

Chapter 8, Interacting with Your Data on Kibana, focuses on the use cases and solutions that can be built on top of your data.

Chapter 9, Managing Data Onboarding with Elastic Agent, looks at the use of a unified agent to continuously onboard and manage the collection of your data.

Chapter 10, Building Search Experiences Using the Elastic Stack, dives deep into the different aspects of building powerful and rich search experiences for your applications.

Chapter 11, Observing Applications and Infrastructure Using the Elastic Stack, focuses on building end-to-end observability solutions using logs, metrics, and APM traces to drive operational resiliency in your environment.

Chapter 12, Security Threat Detection and Response Using the Elastic Stack, looks at implementing security detection and response capability using Elastic's SIEM and EDR solutions to protect your environment from cyber-attacks.

Chapter 13, Architecting Workloads on the Elastic Stack, explores various best practices and reference architectures when it comes to running Elastic Stack workloads in production settings.

To get the most out of this book

You do not need to be an expert in a range of technologies to get the most out of this book. While the following tools are used in the hands-on examples, all the core concepts are introduced and explained in the book. Some additional online research may be required where appropriate for you.

Most chapters in this book include relevant setup instructions and technical requirements related to the contents of the chapter. Read these instructions before continuing with the chapter to follow along with any hands-on exercises or examples.

You can also visit the book's website using the following link: https://www.elasticstackbook.com/

All code used in this book can be accessed from the GitHub repository for this book. A link to the repository is available in the next section. This will help avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Getting-Started-with-Elastic-Stack-8.0. If there's an update to the code, it will be updated in the 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 and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781800569492_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

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

Code in text: 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: "Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system."

A block of code is set as follows:

html, body, #map {
 height: 100%; 
 margin: 0;
 padding: 0
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

[default]
exten => s,1,Dial(Zap/1|30)
exten => s,2,Voicemail(u100)
exten => s,102,Voicemail(b100)
exten => i,1,Voicemail(s0)

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

$ mkdir css
$ cd css

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."

Tips or Important Notes

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Get in touch

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