Knowing what went wrong in the event of a failure is incredibly important. Elasticsearch provides storage for log level events across systems, creating a reliable and redundant way to store, search, and query critical system events. Here are the top reasons we use it:
- Open source and well documented. Elasticsearch has a great community of developers with well-rounded documentation and a lot of support through its community.
- Easily integrated into other technology stacks. It works very well with any kind of log files, including easy Kubernetes integration via daemonsets and tailing Docker logs.
- Redundant and scalable. It is easy to set up multi-node Elasticsearch clusters for speed and reliability.
- Fully functional API to query and modify resources. Kibana is a pretty web frontend that allows for easy searching using the API.
ELK is the common shorthand for the Elasticsearch + LogStash + Kibana combination.
The beauty of using ELK is that you are not locked into any proprietary vendor. It has major support in the industry and many engineers are already familiar with it.
Our team has automation, best practices, and standard operating procedures to help you quickly implement the E.L.K stack for both new and existing software projects rather than doing the trial and error work yourself to figure it out!
Author: Slava Martin
The Crafty Penguins team provides Linux, DevOps, and SRE tools and services for leading edge technology companies around the world.