ELKStacks

ELKStacks, often referred to as the ELK Stack or Elastic Stack, is a collection of open-source tools designed for collecting, indexing, searching, and visualizing large volumes of data, particularly log data. The core components are Elasticsearch, a distributed search and analytics engine; Logstash, a data processing pipeline that ingests, transforms, and forwards data; and Kibana, a web-based interface for searching and visualizing data stored in Elasticsearch. Beats, lightweight data shippers, are frequently used to feed data into Logstash or Elasticsearch, completing the typical data path.

Data flows from sources such as servers, applications, or network devices into Beats or Logstash, where data is parsed and enriched, then indexed into Elasticsearch. Users interact with the data through Kibana, creating dashboards, performing ad hoc queries, and setting up alerts. The stack is used for centralized logging, observability, and security analytics, among other use cases.

Elasticsearch stores and retrieves data in near real-time across a distributed cluster, using sharding and replication to handle scale and fault tolerance. Logstash provides flexible ingestion pipelines via plugins, while Kibana offers visualization, discovery, and dashboard functionality. The Elastic Stack has evolved to include additional components such as Beats and Elastic Agent and to support cloud deployments.

Licensing has varied since the project’s inception; Elastic offers commercial features under proprietary licenses while the core components are available as open-source, and forks such as OpenSearch exist following licensing changes. Adoption ranges from small deployments to large, multi-node clusters managed on-premises or via cloud services.