I have recently found a very useful project available on Github for building your own ELK Stack using Docker. I have updated all the Docker files for using the latest GA version of the Community edition.
When you need to build a monitoring system for a group of applications and you want to have a smart way to solve this problem, give a try to the ELK Stack.
I found the docker-elk project by Anthony Lapenna, it is based on a Docker Compose layout with the following software components related to the ELK Stack:
- Logstash (ingestion)
- ElasticSearch (search engine for indexing)
- Kibana (data visualization)
If you don't know which responsabilities these components have in the monitoring stack, below you can discover more about with a brief description for each one.
Logstash allows to receive and catch any event from your applications. An example of catching can be the direct access to your application log or receiving notifications from your log library via HTTP.
ElasticSearch is a search engine based on Apache Lucene and it is used to store and index all the events against the search engine. This means that all the queries will be very fast and here we are using it as a repository.
Kibana will present your data views configuring custom dashboards depending on the data modeling that you are storing in ElasticSearch.
Actually this project is preconfigured for using the ELK docker images but in the Enterprise edition. Then I made a pull request that includes an upgrade to the latest 6.0.0 version of the ELK Stack using the Community edition (with the -oss suffix in the Docker file).
So if you need a monitoring platform take a look at this project and hope this helps :)
