While installing X-Pack, six important components are installed, three of which: Monitoring, Security, and Profiler we have already discussed in the previous chapters. In this chapter, we will explore the rest of the components to know what they offer and see how they help us with our needs.
In this chapter, we will cover the following sections:
Exploring Alerting and Notification
Exploring Graph
Exploring Reporting
Every organization needs a system that is capable of alerting whenever required. This component of X-Pack provides us with flexibility to create alerts and notifications based on some conditions which get triggered due to change in data. Due to the requirement of having a real-time alert mechanism through which you can trigger some actions based on the conditions specified arises the need for this component named Watcher. It grew out of the necessity of creating actions on the go as and when required without requiring changing the configuration across the Stack. If seen closely, we can create such alerts based on conditions by specifying them directly in the Logstash configuration file using appropriate filters and output plugins. But doing so every time to create a new type of alert would require proper testing before making changes in production environment. Instead of making any changes in the existing setup, you can create your own rules on the go to get alerted...
Graph is another addition to X-Pack, which was earlier available as a standalone component and was also earlier named Graph. It is just adding the complete Graph application into X-Pack without the need to install it separately. It is a very powerful tool aimed at discovering how your terms are interrelated. It provides a simple yet elegant way to uncover the relations between indexed terms and how meaningful they are.
It can help you in a wide range of applications such as recommendation engines, discovering insights for multiple fields and how are they related, showing how you are connected to your friends on social networks, website analysis including vulnerabilities tracking, most used pages, recommending which section of the page a user will click after going on a page, and so on.
Graph can be used from two sources, that is, using the Graph Exploration API from Elasticsearch perspective or by using the interactive Graph visualization tool bundled into Kibana. The biggest advantage...
Reporting is the last yet important addition to the Kibana. It brings the most popular request of generating reports containing the dashboards, visualizations, and searches that can be used for external purposes or adding the reports in presentations, and so on. Reporting brings the awaited feature by using PhantomJS to create reports from the images and stitching it properly in the form of a PDF.
To generate a report, we have the Reporting option present in the toolbar within the Discover, Visualize, and Dashboard pages. We can click on the Reporting option and click on the Generate Printable PDF button or click on Generation URL.
We will not see how to create visualizations/dashboards and save them. Instead we will see how to generate a report and see the reports. Let us save the dashboard and then click on Reporting, followed by clicking on Generate Printable PDF. Upon clicking, it displays the message as follows:
Reporting: Dashboard generation has been queued. You can track...
X-Pack is a must have tool when you need to set up Elastic Stack components in your organization. It helps you with all of the essential and critical requirements, whether it is user management, roles and permissions, alerts of some event, generating reports, analyzing data using graphs, or monitoring of the nodes and indices. These two chapters conclude the new offering of X-Pack and its components.
In the next chapter, we will learn about the best practices and standards to keep in mind and to follow when it comes to production environments.
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