Modernize Your ELK Stack with Robin

Here at Robin, we constantly speak with our customers about the challenges they face with deploying new applications. One topic that keeps coming up is Elastic Stack, otherwise known as ELK Stack (the “LK” representing the other components, Logstash and Kibana).

Specifically, ELK is an end-to-end log analysis solution that allows users to take log data from virtually any source and search, analyze, and ultimately visualize that data in real time. How is the data then used? Development, QA, production, and security teams use the ELK stack to analyze the performance metrics and security logs for their applications. ELK is becoming an increasingly critical tool for those teams, and the need for deploying and managing ELK stack environments is growing in importance.

Many organizations are modernizing their applications, and ELK is no exception. Containerizing applications like ELK with platforms such as Kubernetes can help prepare them for the cloud-native world, but since many data-centric apps were not designed for containers, challenges remain. ELK is a relatively complex, stateful application stack — data must be persistent, so provisioning and managing services takes more insight into the underlying infrastructure to ensure things keep running smoothly. Kubernetes provides the basic building blocks for deploying and managing complex stateful applications such as the ELK stack, but it is far from a turnkey solution.

Today, we are kicking off this three-part series of posts to help guide you on your ELK journey, and to explore how a true application automation platform can address your challenges. To support complex data-centric and network-centric applications like ELK, it is critical to have both application topology awareness and infrastructure topology awareness, and to use them in combination to optimize application performance and resource utilization for your enterprise. And you need both to help bring your data-centric, complex applications to the cloud-native world. Please watch for subsequent posts in this series.

For starters, please check out our Elastic Stack solution brief to see how the Robin platform provides a total solution for the ELK stack, from initial deployment and provisioning to day-2 lifecycle management.