Practical Elastic Stack

Every device in a network, from routers to applications and IoT devices, produces large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces. Commercial observability systems can process this, but they often mean long contracts, higher costs, and sensitive data leaving the company. The Elastic Stack is the leading open-source solution for log management, system security, and enterprise observability. Practical Elastic Stack is your hands-on guide to mastering this powerful technology, designed to help you transform raw log data and security events into actionable operational intelligence.

Beginning with foundational concepts and hands-on installation, this practical guide walks through core architectural concepts, installation methods, and cluster setup across Linux, Windows, and Docker. You will master data transformation pipelines using Logstash, visualize live data, and build interactive dashboards in Kibana. It also covers agent management with Elastic Fleet, application monitoring with APM, and security monitoring with SIEM, with event correlation and detection rules in Kibana. You will learn to leverage the stack for security threat monitoring and set up automated alerting.

By the end of this book, readers will know what distinguishes monitoring from observability and how to build a scalable platform on their network. Upon completing this practical guide, readers possess the real-world skills to design, deploy, and optimize production-ready Elastic Stack environments to solve complex monitoring and security challenges.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
● Parse logs from any source into structured ECS documents.
● Build Kibana dashboards to explore and visualize data.
● Manage Beats agents centrally through Elastic Fleet.
● Detect security threats by correlating events in Kibana.
● Forecast trends and spot anomalies with machine learning.

WHO THIS BOOK IS FOR
This book is written for students, DevOps engineers, SREs, security analysts, system administrators, and software developers building in-house observability. Basic familiarity with Linux administration, networking concepts, and Docker containers is helpful, but no prior experience with the Elastic Stack is required.

1. Introduction to the Elastic Stack
2. Installation and Configuration of Elastic Stack Components
3. Data Processing and Transformation with Logstash
4. Data Visualization and Analysis with Kibana
5. Collecting Data from Diverse Sources with Beats
6. Security Monitoring with Elastic Stack
7. Centralized Agent Management with Elastic Fleet
8. Application Monitoring with Elastic Stack
9. Scaling and Optimizing the Elastic Stack
10. Machine Learning in Elasticsearch
11. Achieving Observability and Future of Elastic Stack

Piotr Ziental has worked with the Elastic Stack for twelve years. His path began in telecommunications at Orange Poland, where data arrived from hundreds of sources, and he wrote his own log parsers to make sense of it. Over the years, he has built tailored Elastic solutions for development and SRE/Ops teams; among them ARK Labs, an AI LLM startup in his home city of Szczecin, where the Elastic Stack gave the development team observability over parsed application logs and a monitoring backbone. His work has also taken him through Intel as a cloud architect and SRE. Today, he works in DevOps and SRE/Ops for a global telecommunications vendor. He came into IT from a technical background in electrical engineering, and later earned a university degree in transport and logistics. On the certification side, there is Red Hat, plus a handful of niche telecom-system certifications that few people outside the field would recognize.