Monitoring Mixed-Language Applications with Elastic Search, Logstash and Kibana (ELK)

Application logging and system diagnostics is nothing new. Ever since we had the first computers scientist and engineers have been storing information about their systems, making it easier to understand what is going on and, in case of failures, what went wrong. Unfortunately there are as many different standards as there are file formats, storage types, locations, operating systems, etc. Recent development in web technology and storage has made it much simpler to gather all the different information in one place and dynamically adapt the display. With the introduction of Logstash with Elasticsearch as a backend, we store, index and query data, making it possible to display and manipulate data in whatever form one wishes. With Kibana as a generic and modern web interface on top, the information can be adapted at will. In this paper we will show how we can process almost any type of structured or unstructured data source. We will also show how data can be visualised and customised on a per user basis and how the system scales when the data volume grows.