Elastic Stack

What is Elastic Stack?

The Elastic Stack, also known as the ELK Stack, is a set of products for ingesting data from any source and format, then searching, analyzing, and visualizing it. It is built on Elasticsearch, a distributed JSON-based search and analytics engine, with Kibana for dashboards and Beats and Logstash for data collection. Elastic offers it as a hosted cloud service or self-managed software.

Key features of Elastic Stack

• Elasticsearch: distributed search and analytics engine.
• Kibana: exploration, dashboards, and deployment management.
• Beats and Logstash: data collection and ingestion.
• Elastic Agent: collects data from applications and infrastructure.
• Machine learning, security, and reporting: features the vendor says are available through Elastic.
• Solution packages: logs, metrics, APM, uptime, SIEM, and endpoint monitoring.
• 200+ prebuilt integrations: for getting data in quickly.
• Flexible deployment: Elastic Cloud on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, or self-managed.

How Elastic Stack works

Beats, Logstash, Elastic Agent, or a web crawler send data into Elasticsearch, which indexes it for fast search. Kibana then queries the data for dashboards, investigations, and alerts. Teams run the stack on Elastic Cloud, in serverless mode, or on their own nodes.

Who uses Elastic Stack?

The Elastic Stack is used by teams in search, log analytics, observability, and security. The vendor highlights Docusign for search, UOL for security, and PepsiCo for observability. It suits engineering teams comfortable operating or tuning a search cluster, or paying for the hosted service.

Elastic Stack pricing

Elastic does not list exact starting prices on its pricing overview. Subscriptions come in Platinum and Enterprise tiers with a 99.95% monthly uptime SLA on hosted and serverless. Serverless is usage-based, hosted is resource-based, and self-managed is license-based by nodes and RAM. The vendor offers a free trial with instant access.

Elastic Stack integrations

Elastic reports more than 200 prebuilt integrations, collected with Elastic Agent, Beats, and a web crawler. Elastic Cloud runs on AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.

Elastic Stack alternatives

Tableau is a visual analytics tool for business users, not a search and log engine. Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence platform strong in Microsoft environments. Looker is Google's modeling-based BI platform. Mode is an analytics tool combining SQL and notebooks; the Elastic Stack instead centers on search, logs, and security data.