Learning ELK Stack

Great quickstart , got me up and going very quickly. It does however lack depth so if you need a reference this would have to be in addition to the elk documentation.

The Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana trinity, usually referred to as the ELK stack, is by far, the de facto standard in log centralization and analysis. Despite being such a popular solution, with some half a million downloads per month, the titles available to the stack or specific to its components are still very limited. This is partially compensated by the official documentation, which is both friendly and easy to follow and allows anyone to quickly get started. Learning ELK Stack is the only title available, until now, that covers the three products at once. It targets beginners who are interested in an overall view of the stack and its components.Released at the end of 2015, Learning ELK Stack is a short book spanning around 200 pages. As any typical beginner's title, it does start with an introductory chapter that gets the reader through the installation process. What follows is a series of chapters where the author first shows the power of the stack and then dives deeper into its components.The very first chapter already reveals problems that are present throughout the whole book. It is very superficial and does not really get a beginner started. First of all, the stack does require Oracle's JDK installed and configured. This is completely overlooked. Now while someone might argue that it is pretty straightforward through a package manager, the reader can still be using a distro whose package manager installs a version of the JDK that is not suitable for the ELK stack. Likewise, the whole stack can be installed through simple apt commands. The author does cover installation through .tar.gz archives, completley overlooking installing and configuring Java from the source and the default Java (yea, you can have multiple at the same time). Which is not that straightforward.Installation apart, nothing is said about the configuration of the three softwares neither as a standalone nor as a stack. Well, this is not properly correct. The astonishing amount of twelve lines is dedicated to this in fact. After an overall overview of the stack, with an example built using data from Yahoo—you ain't limited to use the stack to process logs, the authors focuses on the components, each at a time. These chapters feel like a reference. Each option is listed, but the examples do not go beyond the two lines. Interestingly, by googling sentences from the book, we find a 70% match analysis with the official documentation (Harvard refers to this as mosaic plagiarism), suggesting a copy/paste with a couple of words added/removed.As an example, this is what we find in Learning ELK stack:The mutate filter is an important filter plugin that helps rename, remove, replace, and modify fields in an incoming event.And this is the information we freely find in the official documentation provided by Elastic:The mutate filter allows you to perform general mutations on fields. You can rename, remove, replace, and modify fields in your events.Tying it all up, I do not really recommend this book ,despite being the only title covering the stack as a whole. The documentation the reader will find is first of all inaccurate. Anything else can be found for free in the official documentation.I have tried to contact Packt Publishing asking what is their position on that matter. I did not get any real answer apart from a semi-automatic one.As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!

Just over a month ago, I purchased a copy of Learning ELK stack and is a good book for those wanting a quick ramp up of what ELK is, This is a good step-by-step guide for Elastic Search, Logstash and Kibana. this book its well written and gives an honest account, i would highly recommend this as a first book read to anyone wanting to know about ELK.

Great to begin ELK

A very good book, let down by inaccurate examples of unix command syntax which quite simply doesnt work. I am new to ELK and followed the example scenario presented in the book but had to google and research some of the command syntax as the printed examples returned errors. Its such a shame as the author presents a very thorough step by step guide to configuring the ELK components. I did manage to get everything working and would still recommend the book to newcomers despite the Unix command issues.