What is ELK?

ELK (Elastic, Logstash, Kibana) is a stack of tools for centralized collection, processing, indexing, and analysis of logs.

• Elasticsearch: A distributed search and analytics engine based on Lucene. Used for storing, searching, and analyzing large volumes of data, including logs.
• Logstash: An ETL pipeline tool. Collects data from various sources (files, syslog, Kafka, etc.), transforms it (parses, filters, enriches), and sends it to Elasticsearch.
• Kibana: A web interface for visualizing and analyzing data from Elasticsearch. Allows creating dashboards, charts, searching logs, and exploring data.

The ELK stack is often complemented by the Metricbeat or Filebeat agent for collecting metrics or log files from servers.