Solenix Workshop - The Elastic Stack

20 December 2016

For our December workshop, we went through the functionalities and benefits of using the Elastic Stack (formerly the ELK Stack).

This free and open-source set of tools provides the ability to collect, store and visualise data from any source. It is particularly useful to synthesize big amounts of data into one comprehensible dashboard, allowing its users to quickly extract relevant information out of data. The Elastic Stack consists of four different components: a dashboard (Kibana), a database (ElasticSearch) and two data collectors (Logstash and Beats).

During the workshop, we discussed the following topics:

  • The different aspects of each component
  • What is new in the version 5
  • How Kibana compares to its competitor Grafana

Here at Solenix we use the Elastic Stack to power the BOSS Dashboard, our monitoring solution for complex systems such as spacecraft and ground stations. The BOSS Dashboard allows its users to have an overview of their system’s status, as well as helping them to identify any anomaly rapidly.

At the end of the workshop, we had a constructive talk about how the Elastic Stack could be used in our other projects.