Elasticsearch is a distributed, free and open search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured. Elasticsearch is built on Apache Lucene and was first released in 2010 by Elasticsearch N.V. (now known as Elastic). Known for its simple REST APIs, distributed nature, speed, and scalability, Elasticsearch is the central component of the Elastic Stack, a set of free and open tools for data ingestion, enrichment, storage, analysis, and visualization. Commonly referred to as the ELK Stack (after Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana), the Elastic Stack now includes a rich collection of lightweight shipping agents known as Beats for sending data to Elasticsearch.
I have tested this on-prem as well as in ElasticSearch Cloud. I must admit that it is great and powerful tool. It works really fast and can ingest data in following ways:
- Elastic Beats
- Logstash
- Language clients
- Kibana Dev Tools
How to ingest data into Elasticsearch Service | Elastic Blog
What is interesting that installing any of this „plugins” is super easy and even kid can do it. Configuration of this takes minutes, not hours and is very pleasant.
I have tested also visualization tools: Kibana and alternative for it siren.io.
Kibana – is open source very powerfull tool, which is still under development. It has open community, which reacts very fast for your problems. All of the improvements, bugs are implemented quite fast.
What is interesting in this tool – that having little knowledge of this, not using help you can easly create first dashboards just with few clicks. For more demanding users like me – there is query language – KQL:
Kibana Query Language | Kibana Guide [8.4] | Elastic
which is very similar to SQL. So if you ever learned SQL, using Kibana query language will be for you as piece of cake;)
It is also possible to use ElasticSearch query language (DSL):
Query DSL | Elasticsearch Guide [8.4] | Elastic
which is a little more complex, but allows you for more sophisticated queries, including fuzzy search, term search, geo queries or shape queries.
And here is little overview of exemplary dashboards:
Siren.io is alternative data science tool, with similar capabilities, but it is paid. More info: https://siren.io/downloads/
And here is exemplary demo: https://public.demo.siren.io/HOME/app/investigate#/dashboard/dashboard:Articles?_k=h@99ae399&_a=h@7badcc5&_g=h@a8d9417