Logging and monitoring with Elastic stack on Ubuntu 16.04

Introduction

Elasticsearch is an open source search engine based on Lucene, developed in java. It provides a distributed and multitenant full-text search engine with an HTTP Dashboard web-interface (Kibana) and JSON documents scheme. Elasticsearch is a scalable search engine that can be used to search for all types of documents, including log file. Elasticsearch is the heart of the 'Elastic Stack' or ELK Stack.

Logstash is an open source tool for managing system events and logs. It provides real-time pipelining to collect data. Logstash will collect the log or data, convert all data into JSON documents, and store them in Elasticsearch.

Kibana is a data visualization interface for Elasticsearch. Kibana provides a pretty dashboard (web interfaces), it allows you to manage and visualize all data from Elasticsearch on your own. It's not just beautiful, but also powerful.

In this HOW TO, I will show you how to install and configure Elastic Stack on a single Ubuntu 16.04 server for monitoring server logs and how to install 'Elastic beats' on client PCs with Ubuntu 16.04 and CentOS 7 operating system.

Prerequisite

Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit server with 4GB of RAM, hostname - elk-master

Ubuntu 16.04 64 bit client with 1 GB of RAM, hostname - elk-client1

CentOS 7 64 bit client with 1GB of RAM, hostname - elk-client2

Step 1 - Install Java

Java is required for the Elastic stack deployment. Elasticsearch requires Java 8. It is recommended to use the Oracle JDK 1.8. We will install Java 8 from a PPA repository.

Install the new package 'python-software-properties' so we can add a new repository easily with an apt command.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install -y python-software-properties software-properties-common apt-transport-https

Add the new Java 8 PPA repository with the 'add-apt-repository' command, then update the repository.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java -y sudo apt-get update