Questions on getting started with ELK

[Anita2]

For reference, I have followed this guide to get me started:

How to Install ELK Stack on Ubuntu 18.04 / 20.04 | PhoenixNAP KB

Hello, I'm extremely new to ELK, as in I have just now installed everything, as I will be needing it for a research project.

My current goal is to be able to upload log files onto Elasticsearch and be able to query/organize the data, but I am having some issues.

First, I am not sure why but when I go to http://localhost:5601/ , Kibana doesn't show up but rather the Elastic dashboard comes up. Not sure if this is a problem but if it is, how may I be able to fix it?

Second, I tried to use the home page for ElasticStack anyways and went to 'Add Data' and chose Apache Logs with Filebeat. It produced a 'Getting Started' tutorial, where the second step, (after installing filebeat) is to 'Edit the Configuration', and I have to modify /etc/filebeat/filebeat.yml and insert

output.elasticsearch: hosts: ["<es_url>"] username: "elastic" password: "<password>" setup.kibana: host: "<kibana_url>"

I'm lost on how to modify the above text, I don't think I have a kibana username/password, and what do I replace "<es_url>" and "<kibana_url>" with?

Any help/advice would be appreciated, thank you!

[warkolm (Mark Walkom)]

Welcome to our community!

I'd encourage you to follow Getting Started [7.10] | Elastic. There's things in that article that don't make sense, like using nginx for access control, as that's free functionality

When you say the Elasticsearch dashboards come up, can you post a screenshot of what you mean?

For the second one, that's because that tutorial doesn't setup the native access control. From what I can see in that article you can leave the username and password out and it should work.

[Anita2]

Thank you for the getting started article, I'll be going through it and fixing whatever I can, to get it working!

This is what comes up when I go to localhost:5601

I pressed that add data button under HOME and this is what shows up, where I chose the second option 'Apache logs'. Which I'm now not sure if this would be the correct selection if I jut want to upload log files from my downloads?

But after that screen I am given the Filebeats installation tutorial.

Thank you for your help, I really appreciate it!

[warkolm (Mark Walkom)]

@Anita2

Which I'm now not sure if this would be the correct selection if I jut want to upload log files from my downloads?

If the log files are Apache ones, yes. It will prompt you to install Filebeat to ingest them, you don't upload them via Kibana directly.