In recent years, the processing and analysis of big data have become increasingly important. In this context, Elastic Stack (also known as ELK Stack, namely Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) and Filebeat and Apache Kafka is such a powerful combination of tools that can be used for real-time data processing and analysis. Let’s take a look at how to use these tools to build a real-time log monitoring system.
+---------+ +-------+ +---------+ +-------------+
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| Filebeat+--->+ Kafka +--->+ Logstash+--->+ Elasticsearch|
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+---------+ +-------+ +---------+ +-------------+
Tool introduction
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Filebeat : Filebeat is a lightweight, open source log file data handling tool that can monitor and collect log data, and then quickly send it to Logstash for analysis, or directly to Elasticsearch for indexing.
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Kafka : Kafka is an open source distributed stream processing platform that can be used to build real-time data pipelines and applications. It is known for its high fault tolerance, scalability, and zero-latency processing capabilities.
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Logstash : Logstash is an open source data collection engine that supports real-time data input, filtering, and output. You can use Logstash to collect data in a variety of formats and sources, and then send it to the storage or analysis platform of your choice.
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ElasticSearch : Elasticsearch is an open source distributed search and analysis engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geographic, structured and unstructured data.
System principle
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Data collection : Use Filebeat to monitor and track the specified log files or directories. Once any changes are detected in the log files, Filebeat will read the changed data.
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Data transfer : Filebeat sends the collected log data to Kafka. As a high-throughput message queue, Kafka can cache this data and then wait for Logstash to read it from it.
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Data processing : Logstash reads data from Kafka, filters and transforms it according to predefined rules, and then sends the processed data to Elasticsearch.
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Data storage and query : After Elasticsearch receives the data sent by Logstash, it indexes and stores the data. Users can perform complex searches and data analysis through the RESTful API provided by Elasticsearch.
Through such a system, we can realize real-time log collection, processing and analysis, discover and deal with system problems in a timely manner, monitor business operations in real time, and improve system stability and user experience.