What is the ELK stack ? and how to install it ?

The ELK stack is the combination of 3 tools :

• Elasticsearch
• Logstash
• Kibana

This stack is supported by the elastic company. ELK is well known for centralising logs in infrastrutures. That mainly helps ops and dev to debug applications. They can analyse logs and do statistics with different vizulisation (charts, dashboards…).

But ELK is also well known to process data. Many data scientists use these softwares to manipulate a lot of datas.

What’s Elasticsearch ?

Elasticsearch is a nosql engine. The structure of this database type is the document. One document can store many fields. For example, in ecommerce, you can have a document for a product or a customer.

The strong point of ES is especially the fulltext search. Because Elasticsearch uses the Lucene library and an inverted index.

A cluster of elasticsearch nodes can be very wide due to the easy to scale up. ES allows you to distribute your data across the cluster with sharding. Sharding partition your database in segments and spread it on the cluster.