Using Elastic Stack for Data Analytics

The Covid-19 pandemic, has spared no one humans and businesses are facing its wrath unleashed globally. Business leaders are faced with a decision that would alter their initial plans and growth strategies. The field of data analytics is proving to be of exceptional value in this fight against the disease by tracking its footstep and spread along with the impact on human life and economy.

The early adopters of data analytics see its benefits like improved operational efficiencies, increasing revenues, and better utilization of its resources as a valuable driver of their growth. With the looming pandemic threat companies can monitor their impact on the supply chain, get customer insights or behavioral data in short gauge, overall financial impact, and identify situations that can be salvaged.

As always business decisions are greatly impacted by data analytics. Decision-makers desire more data and complete control in the method of access, analysis, visualization, and its use. Technology providers have flooded the market with easy to collate, prepare, and explore data visualization tools that are light on the infrastructure. Data-driven organizations are trending towards increasing growth. Market shares for the Amazon's, Google's, and Netflix's of the world are its prime exhibits. Business and IT are joining hands in setting up and operating data analytics initiatives at the enterprise level.

Speaking of tools when an organization initiates its data journey, it would like to evaluate something popular, easily available, and nothing better if an open-source which is easy to use and can consume any type of data. It can also do the data cleaning, quickly study it, and give results for what they are looking for on a single platform.

In short, enterprises are looking out for a tool like Elastic stack also known as the "ELK Stack" amongst the technophiles. Elastic Stack gets all the right ticks when it comes to using it for data analytics along with its site and application search features. The broad range of capability or USP of the ELK stack ranges from monitoring the web traffic to performing risk analysis by ingesting petabytes of data giving results in a millisecond.

Elastic Stack finds its use in the various facets of an enterprise’s business value chain like -

• Strategy

• Product Designing & Development

• R&D

• Distribution

• Sales & Marketing

Sneak peek into a couple of successful implementation

Infrastructure monitoring: A leading stock exchange needed, monitoring of servers/ devices to provide the SysAdmin operators and infra team with drag/drop interactive visualizations. Beats, the lightweight data shippers were installed on all servers to be monitored. The data was shipped from target systems to Kafka queues, which was then used to receive data from disparate source systems and make the data available to target systems in real-time. For data processing/parsing and analysis Logstash was ingested into Elasticsearch. Then, Kibana was used to create visualization & dashboard to find the hotspots, diagnose problematic spikes and alerts as desired. An illustration for the same can be seen below:

Security analytics: A leading bank wished to develop a security analytics platform sitting on top of Elastic stack. The main objective here was the integration of monitoring logs, report suspicious events, and detect abnormal behavior and then finally generate operational security dashboards for the IT team. After understanding the RSA Envision log structure, the Elastic environment was set up and collection agents were deployed on servers to fetch data from logs as the 1st phase.

Data enrichment, comprehensive dashboards for detection were the next phases, followed by altering mechanism setup as the Anomaly detection phase. Benefits seen were perfect solutions for threat hunting and securing IT operations, the interactive SIEM provided security teams to triage events for initial investigations.

Why use Elastic Stack for analytics?

• It can store, search & analyze huge volumes of data with speed and give results in real-time

• Easy to learn and use, so user friendly

• Has a broad range of use cases to accommodate a variety of business challenges

• Highly scalable without disturbing current operations

• Visual representation of data in the form of interactive graphs and charts

Where all can you use Elastic and its products?

• Log monitoring - Analyze holistic view of your system, tail a file directory in the UI, study trends with categorized logs with powerful search

• Infrastructure monitoring - Monitor infrastructure in real-time with benefits of indexing of logs & metrics, advanced analytics and visualize data in charts & graphs

• Application performance monitoring - Monitor applications and software services in real-time. Keep a check on the response time of your incoming requests, database queries, calls to caches and external HTTP requests

• Uptime monitoring - Track the availability and response in real-time, detect problems before it affects users and monitor uptime inside and outside the organization

• Kubernetes monitoring - Collect - analyze logs metrics and traces from containers apps, and services running on top of Dockers and Kubernetes on a single platform

• Elastic SIEM - Analyze host and network related security events, undertake alert investigations, interactive threat hunting and automatically detects suspicious activities

• Site Search Services - Create & manage tailored search experience with world class relevance and intuitive customization & rich analytics

The list of Elastic use cases is ever growing with some examples as anti-fraud systems, operational intelligence as a service, payment system monitoring, securing multi-business service platform or searching for financial data in real-time, specifically amongst the financial service providers.

Do write to us or connect on social media to know more on our Elastic Stack service capabilities and our experience in helping our customers leverage the power of their data! You can also check out our previous blog on "How Elasticsearch helps in building efficient enterprise search and analytics?"

NSEIT has been provisioning its customers with quick resolutions to modernize their IT application development and management strategy and enabling them to focus on their core business areas by addressing custom business requirements in highly aggressive timelines.

Navigate to https://nseit.com/alliances_elastic to get more insights on how NSEIT and Elastic is transforming the digital transformation landscape.