ELK stack on a standalone machine?

Elastic Stack Elasticsearch
1

Hello,
Is it a good practice to run ELK stack on a standalone machine?

My concerns:

  1. The search dataset I'm trying to load is huge
  2. Minimum requirement to run Elastic Search, Logstash, Kibana, Elastic Agent

Suggestions are always welcomed!

2

Hi,

While it is possible to run the Elastic Stack on a standalone machine (depending on the amount of data of course), it is definitely not a good practice. We only do this on our test system reduce the costs but even then it can be a problem. Some of the issues you will see:

  • Only one instance can be installed over the package manager, the other 2 need to be installed and updated manually if you follow the recommendations of a 3 node setup
  • if you use a single node cluser, you loose the resiliency granted by replica shards
  • Failover not possible
  • contention for resources from the different services (CPU, Memory, Disk IO, ...)
  • ...

The size of the dataset itself is not the issue - once loaded it just takes space on the disk. The question is: How much Ingest and Search traffic does the server need to serve? How important is availability to you?

In the end, you need to test it yourself, if a single, standalone machine is sufficient for you. If you still want to do this, checkout the recommendations for small clusters

Best regards
Wolfram

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