ELK4

ELK4 is an informal label used to describe the ELK stack—the trio of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana—as deployed or configured during the Kibana 4 era. It is not an official product name, but a shorthand used by some users to refer to the stack’s version around that time, when Kibana introduced a new UI and dashboards.

Elasticsearch provides distributed search and analytics across large datasets. Logstash acts as a data ingestion and transformation pipeline, collecting data from varied sources, applying filters, and routing it to storage. Kibana 4 offers web-based visualization and exploration of the indexed data in Elasticsearch, enabling dashboards and ad hoc querying.

In typical deployments, data sources feed into Logstash (or via Beats), Logstash outputs to Elasticsearch, and Kibana provides the user interface. The stack is commonly used for centralized logging, monitoring, and analytics, supporting scalable indexing and fast search across multi-terabyte datasets.

Over time, Elastic expanded the stack beyond the ELK trio with Beats and other components, and naming conventions shifted toward the Elastic Stack. ELK4 thus reflects historical terminology rather than a formal product line.

See also Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Elastic Stack, Beats.