What is Elasticsearch?

Last updated: February 8, 2026Reviewed date: February 8, 2026Reading time: 6 min read
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The ELK stack is an acronym used to describe a stack that comprises three popular projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Often referred to as Elasticsearch, the ELK stack gives you the ability to aggregate logs from all your systems and applications, analyze these logs, and...

For severe symptoms, danger signs, pregnancy, child illness, or sudden worsening, seek urgent medical care.

বাংলা রোগী নোট এখনো যোগ করা হয়নি। পোস্ট এডিটরে “RX Bangla Patient Mode” বক্স থেকে সহজ বাংলা সারাংশ যোগ করুন।

এই তথ্য শিক্ষা ও সচেতনতার জন্য। এটি ডাক্তারি পরীক্ষা, রোগ নির্ণয় বা প্রেসক্রিপশনের বিকল্প নয়।

Article Summary

The ELK stack is an acronym used to describe a stack that comprises three popular projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Often referred to as Elasticsearch, the ELK stack gives you the ability to aggregate logs from all your systems and applications, analyze these logs, and create visualizations for application and infrastructure monitoring, faster troubleshooting, security analytics, and more. E = Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a distributed...

Key Takeaways

  • This article explains How does the ELK stack work? in simple medical language.
  • This article explains What does the ELK stack do? in simple medical language.
  • This article explains Why is the ELK stack important? in simple medical language.
  • This article explains How can I choose the right solution for the ELK stack? in simple medical language.
Educational health guideWritten for patient understanding and clinical awareness.
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Emergency safety firstUrgent warning signs are highlighted below.

Seek urgent medical care if you notice

These warning signs are general safety guidance. Local emergency numbers and clinical judgment should always come first.

  • Severe symptoms, breathing difficulty, fainting, confusion, or rapidly worsening illness.
  • New weakness, severe pain, high fever, or symptoms after a serious injury.
  • Any symptom that feels urgent, unusual, or unsafe for the patient.
1

Emergency now

Use emergency care for severe, sudden, rapidly worsening, or life-threatening symptoms.

2

See a doctor

Book a professional medical evaluation if symptoms persist, worsen, recur often, affect daily activities, or occur in a high-risk patient.

3

Learn safely

Use this article to understand possible causes, tests, treatment options, prevention, and questions to ask your clinician.

Before reading

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Use these quick guides before reading the article, or return to them when you need help preparing questions for a doctor.

Start here Choose the right pathway for symptoms, reports, medicines, or urgent warning signs. Disease article roadmap Read this topic step by step: meaning, symptoms, warning signs, diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and follow-up. Treatment planner Prepare questions about treatment choices, benefits, risks, side effects, and follow-up. Family & caregiver guide Organize symptoms, reports, medicines, questions, and follow-up safely. Nutrition & diet guide Prepare food, hydration, supplement, and medicine-timing questions safely. Prevention guide Organize risk factors, protective habits, screening, and warning signs. Recovery guide Prepare a safe plan for activity, rehabilitation, warning signs, and follow-up.
Definition

The ELK stack is an acronym used to describe a stack that comprises three popular projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. Often referred to as Elasticsearch, the ELK stack gives you the ability to aggregate logs from all your systems and applications, analyze these logs, and create visualizations for application and infrastructure monitoring, faster troubleshooting, security analytics, and more.

E = Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. Support for various languages, high performance, and schema-free JSON documents makes Elasticsearch an ideal choice for various log analytics and search use cases.

On January 21, 2021, Elastic NV announced that they would change their software licensing strategy and not release new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the permissive Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2) license. Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic license, with source code available under the Elastic License or SSPL. These licenses are not open source and do not offer users the same freedoms. For a secure, high-quality, fully open-source search and analytics suite, you can use the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, ALv2 licensed fork of open-source Elasticsearch and Kibana.

L = Logstash

Logstash is an open-source data ingestion tool that allows you to collect data from various sources, transform it, and send it to your desired destination. With prebuilt filters and support for over 200 plugins, Logstash allows users to easily ingest data regardless of the data source or type.

Logstash is a lightweight, open-source, server-side data processing pipeline that allows you to collect data from various sources, transform it on the fly, and send it to your desired destination. It is most often used as a data pipeline for Elasticsearch, an open-source analytics and search engine. Because of its tight integration with Elasticsearch, powerful log processing capabilities, and over 200 prebuilt open-source plugins that can help you easily index your data, Logstash is a popular choice for loading data into Elasticsearch.

Easily load unstructured data

Logstash allows you to easily ingest unstructured data from various data sources including system logs, website logs, and application server logs.

Prebuilt filters

Logstash offers prebuilt filters, so you can readily transform common data types, index them in Elasticsearch, and start querying without having to build custom data transformation pipelines.

Flexible plugin architecture

With over 200 plugins already available on GitHub, it is likely that someone has already built the plugin that you need to customize your data pipeline. But if one is not available that suits your requirements, you can easily create one yourself.

K = Kibana

Kibana is a data visualization and exploration tool used for log and time-series analytics, application monitoring, and operational intelligence use cases. It offers powerful and easy-to-use features such as histograms, line graphs, pie charts, heat maps, and built-in geospatial support. Also, it provides tight integration with Elasticsearch, a popular analytics and search engine, which makes Kibana the default choice for visualizing data stored in Elasticsearch.

On January 21, 2021, Elastic NV announced that they would change their software licensing strategy and not release new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the permissive Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2) license. Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic license, with source code available under the Elastic License or SSPL. These licenses are not open source and do not offer users the same freedoms. To ensure that the open source community and our customers continue to have a secure, high-quality, fully open source search and analytics suite, we introduced the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, ALv2 licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana. The OpenSearch suite consists of a search engine, OpenSearch, and a visualization and user interface, OpenSearch Dashboards.

You can run Kibana on premises, on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), or on Apache 2.0 licensed versions (up to version 7.10.2) of Amazon OpenSearch Service. OpenSearch Dashboards is an open-source alternative to Kibana, which is also available to self-manage. It was derived from the last open-source version of Kibana (7.10.2). It contains many advancements and is well supported through the OpenSearch Project. With on-premises or Amazon EC2 deployments, you are responsible for provisioning the infrastructure, installing Kibana or OpenSearch Dashboards software, and managing the infrastructure. With OpenSearch Service, Kibana or OpenSearch Dashboards are deployed automatically with your domain as a fully managed service, automatically taking care of all the heavy lifting to manage the cluster.

Interactive charts

Kibana offers intuitive charts and reports that you can use to interactively navigate through large amounts of log data. You can dynamically drag time windows, zoom in and out of specific data subsets, and drill down on reports to extract actionable insights from your data.

Mapping support

Kibana comes with powerful geospatial capabilities, so you can seamlessly layer in geographical information on top of your data and visualize results on maps.

Prebuilt aggregations and filters

Using Kibana’s prebuilt aggregations and filters, you can run various analytics like histograms, top-N queries, and trends in just a few steps.

Easily accessible dashboards

You can easily set up dashboards and reports and share them with others. All you need is a browser to view and explore the data.

How does the ELK stack work?

  1. Logstash ingests, transforms, and sends the data to the right destination.
  2. Elasticsearch indexes, analyzes, and searches the ingested data.
  3. Kibana visualizes the results of the analysis.

What does the ELK stack do?

The ELK stack is used to solve a wide range of problems, including log analytics, document search, security information and event management (SIEM), and observability. It provides the search and analytics engine, data ingestion, and visualization.

Why is the ELK stack important?

The ELK stack fulfills a need in the log analytics space. As more and more of your IT infrastructure moves to public clouds, you need a log management and analytics solution to monitor this infrastructure and process any server logs, application logs, and clickstreams. The ELK stack provides a simple yet robust log analysis solution for your developers and DevOps engineers to gain valuable insights on failure diagnosis, application performance, and infrastructure monitoring—at a fraction of the price.

How can I choose the right solution for the ELK stack?

At AWS, you can choose to deploy and manage the ELK stack yourself on EC2. But, scaling up and down to meet your business requirements or achieving security and compliance is a challenge with the self-managed option. If you prefer that your developers or DevOps engineers spend their time building innovative applications or managing operational tasks such as deployment, upgrades, software installation and patching, backups, and monitoring, OpenSearch Service is a fully managed open-source alternative that makes it easier to deploy, operate, and scale OpenSearch clusters securely and cost-effectively on AWS.

Doctor visit helper

Prepare before seeing a doctor

A simple rural-patient checklist to help you explain symptoms clearly, ask better questions, and avoid unsafe self-treatment.

Safety note: This is not a prescription or diagnosis. For severe symptoms, pregnancy danger signs, children with serious illness, chest pain, breathing difficulty, stroke-like weakness, or major injury, seek urgent care.

Which doctor may help?

Start with a registered doctor or the nearest qualified health center.

What to tell the doctor

  • Write when the problem started and how it changed.
  • Bring old prescriptions, investigation reports, and current medicines.
  • Write allergies, pregnancy status, diabetes, kidney/liver disease, and major past illnesses.
  • Bring one family member if the patient is weak, elderly, confused, or a child.

Questions to ask

  • What is the most likely cause of my symptoms?
  • Which danger signs mean I should go to hospital quickly?
  • Which tests are necessary now, and which can wait?
  • How should I take medicines safely and what side effects should I watch for?
  • When should I come for follow-up?

Tests to discuss

  • Vital signs: temperature, pulse, blood pressure, oxygen saturation
  • Basic physical examination by a clinician
  • CBC, urine test, blood sugar, or imaging only when clinically needed

Avoid these mistakes

  • Do not use antibiotics, steroid tablets/injections, or strong painkillers without proper medical advice.
  • Do not hide pregnancy, kidney disease, ulcer, allergy, or blood thinner use.
  • Do not delay emergency care when danger signs are present.

Medicine safety and first-aid guide

This section is for patient education only. It does not replace a doctor, pharmacist, or emergency care.

Safe first steps

  • Rest, drink safe water, and observe symptoms carefully.
  • Keep a written note of symptoms, duration, temperature, medicines already taken, and allergy history.
  • Seek medical care quickly if symptoms are severe, worsening, or unusual for the patient.

OTC medicine safety

  • For mild pain or fever, ask a registered pharmacist or doctor before using common over-the-counter pain/fever medicines.
  • Do not combine multiple pain medicines without advice, especially if you have kidney disease, liver disease, stomach ulcer, asthma, pregnancy, or take blood thinners.
  • Do not give adult medicines to children unless a qualified clinician advises it.

Avoid these mistakes

  • Do not start antibiotics without a proper medical decision.
  • Do not use steroid tablets or injections casually for quick relief.
  • Do not delay emergency care because of home remedies.

Get urgent help if

  • Severe symptoms, confusion, fainting, breathing difficulty, chest pain, severe dehydration, or sudden weakness need urgent medical care.
Medicine names, dose, and timing must be decided by a qualified clinician or pharmacist after checking age, pregnancy, allergy, other diseases, and current medicines.

For rural patients and family caregivers

Patient health record and symptom diary

Write your symptoms, medicines already taken, test results, and questions before visiting a doctor. This note stays on your device unless you print or copy it.

Doctor to discuss: Doctor / qualified healthcare provider
Tests to discuss with doctor
  • Basic vital signs: temperature, pulse, blood pressure, oxygen level if needed
  • Relevant blood, urine, imaging, or specialist tests only after clinical assessment
Questions to ask
  • What is the most likely cause of my symptoms?
  • Which warning signs mean I should go to emergency care?
  • Which tests are really needed now?
  • Which medicines are safe for my age, pregnancy status, allergy, kidney/liver/stomach condition, and current medicines?

Emergency warning signs such as chest pain, severe breathing difficulty, sudden weakness, confusion, severe dehydration, major injury, or loss of bladder/bowel control need urgent medical care. Do not wait for online information.

Safe pathway to proper treatment

Care roadmap for: What is Elasticsearch?

Use this simple roadmap to understand the next safe steps. It is educational and does not replace examination by a doctor.

Go to emergency care if you notice:
  • Severe or rapidly worsening symptoms
  • Breathing difficulty, chest pain, fainting, confusion, severe weakness, major injury, or severe dehydration
Doctor / service to discuss: Qualified healthcare provider; specialist depends on symptoms and examination.
  1. Step 1

    Check danger signs first

    If danger signs are present, seek emergency care and do not wait for online information.

  2. Step 2

    Record the symptom story

    Write when symptoms started, severity, medicines already taken, allergies, pregnancy status, and test results.

  3. Step 3

    Visit a qualified clinician

    A doctor, nurse, or qualified healthcare provider can examine you and decide which tests or treatment are needed.

  4. Step 4

    Do only useful tests

    Do tests after clinical assessment. Avoid unnecessary tests, random antibiotics, or repeated medicines without diagnosis.

  5. Step 5

    Follow up and return early if worse

    If symptoms worsen, new warning signs appear, or treatment is not helping, return for review quickly.

Rural patient practical tips
  • Take a written symptom diary and all previous prescriptions/test reports.
  • Do not hide medicines already taken, even herbal or over-the-counter medicines.
  • Ask which warning signs mean urgent referral to hospital.

This roadmap is for education. A real diagnosis and treatment plan requires history, examination, and clinical judgment.

RX Patient Help

Ask a health question safely

Write your symptom story. A health professional or site editor can review it before any answer is prepared. This box is not for emergency care.

Emergency first: Severe chest pain, breathing trouble, unconsciousness, stroke signs, severe injury, heavy bleeding, or rapidly worsening symptoms need urgent local medical care now.

Frequently Asked Questions

E = Elasticsearch Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. Support for various languages, high performance, and schema-free JSON documents makes Elasticsearch an ideal choice for various log analytics and search use cases. On January 21, 2021, Elastic NV announced that they would change their software licensing strategy and not release new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the permissive Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2) license. Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic license, with source code available under the Elastic License or SSPL. These licenses are not open source and do not offer users the same freedoms. For a secure, high-quality, fully open-source search and analytics suite, you can use the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, ALv2 licensed fork of open-source Elasticsearch and Kibana. L = Logstash Logstash is an open-source data ingestion tool that allows you to collect data from various sources, transform it, and send it to your desired destination. With prebuilt filters and support for over 200 plugins, Logstash allows users to easily ingest data regardless of the data source or type. Logstash is a lightweight, open-source, server-side data processing pipeline that allows you to collect data from various sources, transform it on the fly, and send it to your desired destination. It is most often used as a data pipeline for Elasticsearch, an open-source analytics and search engine. Because of its tight integration with Elasticsearch, powerful log processing capabilities, and over 200 prebuilt open-source plugins that can help you easily index your data, Logstash is a popular choice for loading data into Elasticsearch. Easily load unstructured data Logstash allows you to easily ingest unstructured data from various data sources including system logs, website logs, and application server logs. Prebuilt filters Logstash offers prebuilt filters, so you can readily transform common data types, index them in Elasticsearch, and start querying without having to build custom data transformation pipelines. Flexible plugin architecture With over 200 plugins already available on GitHub, it is likely that someone has already built the plugin that you need to customize your data pipeline. But if one is not available that suits your requirements, you can easily create one yourself. K = Kibana Kibana is a data visualization and exploration tool used for log and time-series analytics, application monitoring, and operational intelligence use cases. It offers powerful and easy-to-use features such as histograms, line graphs, pie charts, heat maps, and built-in geospatial support. Also, it provides tight integration with Elasticsearch, a popular analytics and search engine, which makes Kibana the default choice for visualizing data stored in Elasticsearch. On January 21, 2021, Elastic NV announced that they would change their software licensing strategy and not release new versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana under the permissive Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2) license. Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic license, with source code available under the Elastic License or SSPL. These licenses are not open source and do not offer users the same freedoms. To ensure that the open source community and our customers continue to have a secure, high-quality, fully open source search and analytics suite, we introduced the OpenSearch project, a community-driven, ALv2 licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana. The OpenSearch suite consists of a search engine, OpenSearch, and a visualization and user interface, OpenSearch Dashboards. You can run Kibana on premises, on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), or on Apache 2.0 licensed versions (up to version 7.10.2) of Amazon OpenSearch Service. OpenSearch Dashboards is an open-source alternative to Kibana, which is also available to self-manage. It was derived from the last open-source version of Kibana (7.10.2). It contains many advancements and is well supported through the OpenSearch Project. With on-premises or Amazon EC2 deployments, you are responsible for provisioning the infrastructure, installing Kibana or OpenSearch Dashboards software, and managing the infrastructure. With OpenSearch Service, Kibana or OpenSearch Dashboards are deployed automatically with your domain as a fully managed service, automatically taking care of all the heavy lifting to manage the cluster. Interactive charts Kibana offers intuitive charts and reports that you can use to interactively navigate through large amounts of log data. You can dynamically drag time windows, zoom in and out of specific data subsets, and drill down on reports to extract actionable insights from your data. Mapping support Kibana comes with powerful geospatial capabilities, so you can seamlessly layer in geographical information on top of your data and visualize results on maps. Prebuilt aggregations and filters Using Kibana’s prebuilt aggregations and filters, you can run various analytics like histograms, top-N queries, and trends in just a few steps. Easily accessible dashboards You can easily set up dashboards and reports and share them with others. All you need is a browser to view and explore the data. How does the ELK stack work?

Logstash ingests, transforms, and sends the data to the right destination. Elasticsearch indexes, analyzes, and searches the ingested data. Kibana visualizes the results of the analysis.

What does the ELK stack do?

The ELK stack is used to solve a wide range of problems, including log analytics, document search, security information and event management (SIEM), and observability. It provides the search and analytics engine, data ingestion, and visualization.

Why is the ELK stack important?

The ELK stack fulfills a need in the log analytics space. As more and more of your IT infrastructure moves to public clouds, you need a log management and analytics solution to monitor this infrastructure and process any server logs, application logs, and clickstreams. The ELK stack provides a simple yet robust log analysis solution for your developers and DevOps engineers to gain valuable insights on failure diagnosis, application performance, and infrastructure monitoring—at a fraction of the price.

How can I choose the right solution for the ELK stack?

At AWS, you can choose to deploy and manage the ELK stack yourself on EC2. But, scaling up and down to meet your business requirements or achieving security and compliance is a challenge with the self-managed option. If you prefer that your developers or DevOps engineers spend their time building innovative applications or managing operational tasks such as deployment, upgrades, software installation and patching, backups, and monitoring, OpenSearch Service is a fully managed open-source alternative that makes it easier to…

References

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