Patrick Kleindienst

• Talking about highly scalable and reliable sys- tems, issues like logging and monitoring are often disregarded. However, being able to manage to- day’s software systems absolutely requires deep knowledge about the current state of applications as well as the underlying infrastructure. Extract- ing and preparing debug information as well as various metrics in a fast and clearly arranged manner is an essential precondition in order to handle this task. Since we at Bertsch Innovation GmbH also face increasing requirements concerning Media- Cockpit as one of our core products, we decided to establish a centralized logging infrastructure in order to come up to the application’s evolution towards a more and more distributed system. In this paper, I want to describe the steps that I have taken in order to setup a functioning logging tool stack consisting of Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana (usually abbreviated as ELK stack ). Besides outlining proper setup and configuration, I will also discuss possi- ble pitfalls as well as custom adjustments made when ELK did not meet our demands.