ELK Elasticsearch Review

ELK provides 

• good end to end log monitoring
• Logstash grok pattern
• elasticserach indexing
• easily configurable Kibana dashboards
• feature rich and appealing Kibana UI, as its USP.

The product offers a powerful, cost effective solution for proprietary log management and is easy to understand and start with. This saves cost as well as enhances usability.

The open source version should ship basic security versions with it. Alerting is an important feature which is not available in the open source stack.

About two years.

Stability issues can be seen with Logstash and can be addressed using Kafka. Also, data collections may not be 100% optimal using Filebeat and could be further improved.

The product is highly scalable, especially on the database side (elasticserach).

Have worked on the open source version and, hence, I don't have much information about tech support.

I have not worked with another solution.

The setup is straightforward for PoC, but becomes complex while scaling it or deploying it for production.

Yes, I evaluated GrayLog and Fluentd, but ELK was more feature rich.

The ELK open source stack is rich in features but lacks the essential security features.

ELK is one of the best open source alternatives for log management. If alerting and security features can be built by the team internally, on top of the stack, then the product is for sure going to add a lot of value to business.