Software Architect's Handbook

Using Elastic Stack

One of the solutions to centralizing your logging functionality so that log information can be consolidated and managed is the Elastic Stack. The Elastic Stack is an integrated solution of open-source products that offer a highly scalable end-to-end solution for aggregating, searching, analyzing, and visualizing logging data.

It was formerly known as (and you may still hear it referred to as) the ELK stack, an acronym that represents the solution's use of the Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana products. A data shipper product named Beats, which is part of Elastic Stack, was not part of the original ELK stack. One type of data shipper within Beats is Filebeat, which can be used for text log files.