ELK principle

To monitor applications results you can rely on logs files. ELK (Elastic search, Logstash, Kibana) is a wonderful stack to monitor that.

You can consult the official website: http://www.elasticsearch.org/

Principle

To extract information from your logs, you need to:

• Declare which log file(s) to monitor and what to look for (= extract useful information)
• Agregate all the logs into a central database for computing
• Display some information

Architecture

In reality this is achieve through the following installation:

• Each server has a local Logstash agent to retrieve and send data
• All the logs events are send to a common server ElasticSearch
• Data is displayed in Kibana

Detailed process

If we zoom a little, this is the exact process:

• ELK installation: http://www.elasticsearch.org/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/current/setup.html