What is ELK?
ELK is made up of three different services. It is an acronym for Elasticsearch(E), Logstash(L), and Kibana(K). All three acronyms are open-source and created by the same team. It serves as a wrapper for Apache Lucene and is written in the JAVA language. It is easy to use, scalable, and quite flexible.
Key Features
- It aggregates logs from all your systems.
- It analyzes the logs.
- It creates visualizations for applications.
- There is a feature of fast monitoring and troubleshooting.
Advantages
- A wide range of plugins is available.
- It allows doing everything one needs with only one tool.
- It is free to get started and has grown in popularity because of its low financial barrier to entry.
- The organizations have multiple hosting options to choose from when it comes to deploying an ELK stack.
- It offers centralized logging capabilities.
- Users of ELK Stack can create data visualizations and build custom dashboards using real-time data from Elasticsearch.
Disadvantages
- The learning curve is steep.
- Though it is free to use but building and maintaining this tool requires infrastructure and resources.
- It has complex management requirements such as configuring log parsing and ingestion, building a data pipeline, monitoring and handling exceptions to avoid data loss, and many more.
- Users have to pay for the feature of authentication and alert.
Graylog vs ELK
To organize the workflow and coordinate teams, management tools are used. With the help of management tools, one can complete any tasks faster, track projects, manage your team, and plan for future tasks. An engineer goes and checks out the log files and with the right application to handle the tasks, it becomes easy to seek out the problem in the device. ELK stack is used for big data analysis whereas Graylog is mostly used for log analysis. They are two prominent log management solutions. Both Graylog and ELK have their own pros and cons. Also, everyone has different requirements, which should help the user to make a decision. Let’s find out in what aspects they differ.