DevOps Intermediate

What is ELK Stack?

A popular log management platform combining Elasticsearch (search), Logstash (processing), and Kibana (visualization).

The ELK Stack collects, processes, stores, and visualizes log data. Logstash (or Filebeat) collects logs from various sources, transforms them, and sends to Elasticsearch for indexing. Kibana provides dashboards and search interfaces.

Modern variants include the Elastic Stack (adding Beats for lightweight data shipping) and alternatives like Grafana Loki (log aggregation optimized for cost). ELK is the standard for centralized logging in enterprise environments.

Related Terms

Immutable Infrastructure

An approach where servers are never modified after deployment — changes require building and deploying entirely new server instances.

Environment Variable

A dynamic value stored outside the application code that configures behavior without hardcoding sensitive or environment-specific data.

An endpoint or mechanism that reports whether an application is running correctly and ready to handle requests.

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Service Discovery

A mechanism that automatically detects and tracks the network locations of service instances in distributed systems.

An open-source analytics and visualization platform for creating dashboards from various data sources.

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