What are the main components of the Elastic Stack and how do they interact with each other?

Elastic Stack (formerly ELK Stack) is a set of tools for collecting, storing, analyzing, and visualizing data. Main components:

1. Elasticsearch — a distributed search and analytics engine that stores and indexes data.

2. Logstash — a tool for collecting, processing, and transmitting data to Elasticsearch. It allows filtering, transforming, and enriching data.

3. Kibana — a web interface for visualizing data from Elasticsearch, creating dashboards and reports.

4. Beats — lightweight agents for collecting data from servers and sending it to Logstash or directly to Elasticsearch (e.g., Filebeat for logs).

Interaction:

• Beats collect data and send it to Logstash or Elasticsearch.
• Logstash processes the data and forwards it to Elasticsearch.
• Elasticsearch indexes and stores the data.
• Kibana provides a user-friendly interface for analyzing and visualizing data from Elasticsearch.

Thus, Elastic Stack provides a complete data workflow — from collection to analysis.