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LogStash: A great way to spend your Time getting to know ELK and Logging in general
March 25, 2019

LogStash: A great way to spend your Time getting to know ELK and Logging in general

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Logstash

We investigated (and use) Logstash as apart of our ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana) stack. We input data from websites that post daily updates. This data is read into Logstash from RSS feeds, transformed in Logstash, then Sent to Elasticsearch / Kibana for visualization and reporting. Our problem was we needed to scrape large amounts of unstructured data from multiple sites that provided users the ability to post information. This information was free form. To make matters more interesting, these sites did not have an open API to query the data directly, so writing a simple cURL bot would not suffice. Therefore, we turned to ELK, due to previous projects where we employed ELK successfully. So the primary Return On Investment (ROI) is the fact that we had a fast, tightly Cohesive (but loosely coupled) stack of software that we knew how to configure and integrate well with our Laboratory.
  • Modern: most Admin, Server and/or DevtyOps-Centric software worth it's salt will have the ability to configure it's services and features from a small webpage and REST API. Logstash is no exception
  • Speed: Logstash configuration is just a reload away. While you CAN use the gui (see point above), editing the configuration files directly is also a great option. Our configuration files are hosted on an internal Repository, that once we make a change, we and track them as we do a reload, and those changes are reflected in Logstash almost immediately (dependent on the Data Source's speed and flow of Data)
  • Configuration: Logstash is very simple to configure, and fulfills our desire to keep configuration files in a plantext format.
  • OpenSource friendly: Logstash is opensource, and built with open source tools
  • Memory: Logstash is a HOG, if you are deploying it on commodity (i.e. cheap and old) hardware: You will need at least 2GB, just for Logstash. So don't expect to run your entire ELK stack on one AMD Athlon machine.
  • Overlap: Logstash fills in an area of the ELK stack that makes the most sense: as a log file transformer / shipper. However, if you start breaking that stack, with the addition of other components- you start seeing where features of Logstash may be implemented or solved in the additional components much easier (or better, or to a higher degree of resolution)
  • More Overlap: Since my team employs Syslog-ng extensively- Logstash can sometimes get in the way (and this may be a problem for DevOps stacks overall): You can configure Syslog to record certain information from a source, filter that data, and even export that data in a particular format. Logstash will pick that data up, and then parse it. However, if you don't keep your Syslog-ng configuration files, and your Logstash configuration files in sync, your results will not be what you expected, and this will translate into (sometimes) hours/days of work, hunting down a line item in a configuration file.
  • Positive: LogStash is OpenSource. While this should not be directly construed as Free, it's a great start towards Free. OpenSource means that while it's free to download, there are no regular patch schedules, no support from a company, no engineer you can get on the phone / email to solve a problem. You are your own Engineer. You are your own Phone Call. You are your own ticketing system.
  • Negative: Since Logstash's features are so extensive, you will often find yourself saying "I can just solve this problem better going further down / up the Stack!". This is not a BAD quality, necessarily and it really only depends on what Your Project's Aim is.
  • Positive: LogStash is a dream to configure and run. A few hours of work, and you are on your way to collecting and shipping logs to their required addresses!
MongoDB and Azure SQL Database are just that: Databases, and they allow you to pipe data into a database, which means that alot of the log filtering becomes a simple exercise of querying information from a DBMS. However, LogStash was chosen for it's ease of integration into our choice of using ELK

Elasticsearch is an obvious inclusion: Using Logstash with it's native DevOps stack its really rational
Perfect for projects where Elasticsearch makes sense: if you decide to employ ES in a project, then you will almost inevitably use LogStash, and you should anyways. Such projects would include: 1. Data Science (reading, recording or measure web-based Analytics, Metrics) 2. Web Scraping (which was one of our earlier projects involving LogStash) 3. Syslog-ng Management: While I did point out that it can be a bit of an electric boo-ga-loo in finding an errant configuration item, it is still worth it to implement Syslog-ng management via LogStash: being able to fine-tune your log messages and then pipe them to other sources, depending on the data being read in, is incredibly powerful, and I would say is exemplar of what modern Computer Science looks like: Less Specialization in mathematics, and more specialization in storing and recording data (i.e. Less Engineering, and more Design).