- [Elasticsearch](https://www.elastic.co/what-is/elasticsearch) is a distributed, free and open search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured.
- [Logstash](https://www.elastic.co/logstash/) is a free and open server-side data processing pipeline that ingests data from a multitude of sources, transforms it, and then sends it to your favourite "stash."
- [Kibana](https://www.elastic.co/kibana/) is a free and open user interface that lets you visualize your Elasticsearch data and navigate the Elastic Stack. Do anything from tracking query load to understanding the way requests flow through your apps.
On top of the above-mentioned components, you might also see Beats which are lightweight agents that are installed on edge hosts to collect different types of data for forwarding into the stack.
For the hands-on scenario, there are many places you can deploy the Elastic Stack but we are going to be using docker-compose to deploy locally on our system.
[Start the Elastic Stack with Docker Compose](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elastic-stack-get-started/current/get-started-stack-docker.html#get-started-docker-tls)
If you follow either this repository or the one that I used you will have either the password of "changeme" or in my repository the password of "90DaysOfDevOps". The username is "elastic"
When you have selected "Add Data" it takes a while to populate some of that data and then you have the "View Data" option and a list of the available ways to view that data in the dropdown.
> This dashboard contains sample data for you to play with. You can view it, search it, and interact with the visualizations. For more information about Kibana, check our docs.
This is using Kibana to visualise data that has been added into ElasticSearch via Logstash. This is not the only option but I wanted to deploy and look at this.
We are going to cover Grafana at some point and you are going to see some data visualisation similarities between the two, you have also seen Prometheus.
The key takeaway I have had between the Elastic Stack and Prometheus + Grafana is that Elastic Stack or ELK Stack is focused on Logs and Prometheus is focused on metrics.
I was reading this article from MetricFire [Prometheus vs. ELK](https://www.metricfire.com/blog/prometheus-vs-elk/) to get a better understanding of the different offerings.
