Logstash JDBC Input vs ElasticSearch JDBC Importer

[matt40413]

So I got a working example working using a Postgres Database and Logstash/ElasticSearch and Kibana. It's basic....but it works.

Im very new to this, so I don't think I truly understand what Logstash does vs ElasticSearch (Kibana seems understandable enough).

However I came across this: https://github.com/jprante/elasticsearch-jdbc
and im not entirely sure what the difference is....besides not using logstash and it not being an official plugin? Im basically wanting to just display sensor data (from a weather sensor database on Postgres) to be searchable within some "Fancy" kibana visualizations.

Is there a better tool?

Thanks!

[jprante (Jörg Prante)]

Thanks for the interest in my JDBC importer project.

@matt40413

However I came across this: GitHub - jprante/elasticsearch-jdbc: JDBC importer for Elasticsearch and im not entirely sure what the difference is....besides not using logstash and it not being an official plugin?

The JDBC importer is one of my personal spare time projects since 2012. The standalone Java application (once it was a plugin for Elasticsearch, or a "river" to be precise, which is now obsolete) is useful to generate JSON documents from SQL relational table data, and index them into Elasticsearch. It comes with open source JDBC drivers out of the box (e.g. PostgresQL JDBC), but supports also other proprietary JDBC drivers. I hope I can find time to update the JDBC importer to Elasticsearch 5 soon, because in the last six months, I had to take a break. It's mostly used as a starting point to kick off customized Java application developments for pushing JDBC data to Elasticsearch, as you can see by the 550 forks.

Logstash is part of the commercially supported Elastic stack for processing data from log sources, transforming them, and indexing them into Elasticsearch. It's written in JRuby and offers a JDBC connector, besides many other connectors.

[matt40413]

Is there really any advantage (or disadvantage) to one over the other? Right now im using the Logstash JDBC Plugin. Which seems to index things into ElasticSearch...I guess the rivers (deprecated) or your JDBC Importer just skips the Logstash step?

I guess the only positive I see to using the Logstash JDBC plugin is that it's an officially supported item. At least for my case.

Unless theirs another item out there that would work better, im basically just wanting to pull some basic data from a Postgres database to be searchable/viewable on a Kibana instance dashboard.